biteDiscovery
Shakespeare's SonnetsWilliam Shakespeare

poetry · Item 1

A reason to turn the page

You feed your light on itself and starve the world—what right has one bloom to bury a spring?

Discovery 6 of 15

I

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.