"From fairest creatures we desire increase".
The first sonnet introduces many of the themes that define the sequence of beauty, the passage of human life in time and the ideas of virtue and wasteful self-consumption-thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes" (Line 5), and the love the speaker bears for the young man. This love causes the speaker to bring a young man above the whole world and to consider his procreation a form of "pity" for the rest of earth. "Sonnet 1" opens not only the entire sequence of sonnets, but also the first mini-sequence, a group comprising the first seventeen sonnets, because they each push the young man to bear children as an act of defiance against time. .
The logical structure of "Sonnet 1" is easy to comprehend. The first quatrain states the moral premise that beauty should strive to propagate itself: "From fairest creatures we desire increase" (Line 1). The speaker is simply stating that everyone desires mother nature, such as our best cattle, plants and poultry to multiply in order to preserve their "beauty's rose" (Line 2) for the world. The rose symbolizes all beautiful things. By reproducing itself it could, in a sense, become immortal. That way, when the parent dies, "as the riper should by time decease" (Line 3), the child might continue its beauty "His tender heir might bear his memory" (Line 4). .
Some of the metaphoric images in the second quatrain are quite hard to understand. The image of the young man and his own bright eyes, feeding his "lights flame" (Line 6) with "self substantial fuel" (Line 6), for instance, is an extremely intricate image of self-absorption. Therefore, the second quatrain accuses the young man of urgent reason to change his ways and obey the moral premise because if he does not change, his beauty will wither and disappear. The speaker says that this makes the young man his own unwitting enemy, for it makes "a famine where abundance lies" and hoards all the young man's beauty for himself.
