Shakespeare's Sonnets

[baran.amad]

Sonnet 1

Original Text

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease
His tender heir might bear his memory.
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.


Modern Text

We want the most beautiful people to have children, so their beauty will be preserved forever—when the parent dies, the child he leaves behind will remind us of his beauty. But you, in love with your own pretty eyes, are letting your beauty burn itself out. You’re starving the world of your beauty rather than spreading the wealth around. You’re acting like your own worst enemy! Right now you’re the best-looking thing in the world, the only person as beautiful as springtime. But your beauty is like a new bud, and you’re letting it die before it can develop and bring you true happiness. You’re a young man, but you act like an old miser—you’re wasting your beauty by hoarding it and keeping it to yourself! Take pity on the rest of us, or this is how you’ll be remembered: as the greedy pig who hogged his own beauty and took it with him to the grave.

[baran.amad]

Sonnet 2

Original Text

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held.
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use
If thou couldst answer, “This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.


Modern Text

When forty years have gone by and carved deep wrinkles in your forehead, your youthful beauty, which everyone likes to look at now, will be worth little. Then, when someone asks you where all your beauty is—all the treasure of your virile youth—if you were to say that it’s all there in your withered face and sunken eyes, that would be an all-consuming shame and nothing to be proud of. You’d have a much better excuse if, decades from now, you could say you spent your beauty and youth raising a child. If someone were to ask you why you looked so old, you could say, “The effort I spent raising this beautiful child explains the sorry old state I’m in”—and meanwhile your child’s beauty would be a new incarnation of your own! Having a beautiful child would be like being born again in old age, with the blood that flows coldly in your old veins becoming warm again in his.

[baran.amad]

Sonnet 3

Original Text

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,
Now is the time that face should form another,
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live remembered not to be,
Die single and thine image dies with thee.


Modern Text

Look in your mirror and tell the face you see that it’s time to father a child. Your face is fresh and healthy now, but if you don’t reproduce it, you’ll be cheating the world and cursing a woman who would happily be your child’s mother. After all, do you think there’s a woman out there so beautiful that she’d refuse to have your child? And what man would be so foolish as to allow his own self-absorption to stop himself from fathering children? You are like a mirror to your own mother, and when she looks at you she can gaze back at the lovely springtime of her youth. In the same way, when you are old and wrinkled, you’ll be able to look at your child and see yourself in your prime. But if you choose not to have a child to remember you, you’ll die alone and leave no memory of your own image.