From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die.

These lines open Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1 (published in the 1609 quarto, Shakespeare’s Sonnets). The poem begins the so‑called “procreation sonnets” (roughly Sonnets 1–17), in which the speaker urges a beautiful young man—often identified by scholars as the “Fair Youth”—to marry and have children. The argument is framed in Renaissance terms: beauty is a precious but perishable gift, and reproduction is presented as a way to preserve it against time’s decay. Sonnet 1 sets the sequence’s early preoccupation with lineage, inheritance, and the struggle to outlast mortality through posterity.

The speaker claims that we naturally want the most beautiful people (“fairest creatures”) to “increase,” i.e., to reproduce, so that beauty can persist beyond an individual lifespan. The metaphor “beauty’s rose” suggests both loveliness and fragility: a rose blooms brilliantly but quickly withers. The couplet’s logic is ethical as well as aesthetic—beauty carries a kind of social obligation not to be hoarded or wasted. In the larger sonnet, this becomes a critique of narcissism: refusing to have heirs is figured as consuming one’s own beauty rather than investing it in the future. Time is the implicit antagonist, and procreation the proposed remedy.

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.