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.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1
To help some who may stumble across this humble blog, let say upfront that a churl is a stingy or sullen person and niggarding is being stingy. I take it the poet is telling a woman she is the gorgeous herald of spring and shouldn’t bury her beauty in moodiness or perhaps strong shyness.
Not quite – “churl” did take this meaning around Shakespeare’s day, but also just meant a man or a fellow (cf. Kerl,in German) so this sonnet is clearly written to a good-looking man, not a woman. I think the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, may have been the addressee.
Cheers
Otepoti
“Churl” goes back to the Anglo-Saxon “ceorl,” which was simply a word for “man.” It eventually came to mean “ordinary man” as opposed to “noble,” and (since ordinary men were looked on with contempt) it got all kinds of bad connotations attached to it. “Villain” is a similar word–it originally just meant someone who lived in the town at the base of the castle wall, rather than within the castle itself.
Okay. I hesitated saying it was to a woman, but I did it anyway. Could usage like this have led to churl coming to mean a stingy person, since the line follows nicely that the stingy man is wasting himself begrudging the world his talents?
Begrudging the world his heirs, more. Henry Wriothesley was unwilling to commit to marriage and children, to the annoyance of Elizabeth I.
Cheers
Otepoti
Stay safe at the Tea Party.
I didn’t go to any party. I went to a church choir practice instead.