FROM FAIREST CREATURES WE DESIRE INCREASE When God saw his creatures, he commanded them to increase and multiply. Shakespeare, in this sonnet, suggests we have internalized the paradisal command in an aestheticized form: From fairest creatures we desire increase. The sonnet begins, so to speak, in the desire for an Eden where beauty\'s rose will never die; but the fall quickly arrives with decease (where we expect, by comparative with increase, the milder decrease). …showed first 75 words of 659 total…

…showed last 75 words of 659 total…which calls attention to it self. This sonnet is leaning mostly towards the typical Shakespearean sonnet whereby three quatrains are summarized by a couplet. We do find though that this sonnet has avoided the two structures a reader might expect – the Petrachan sonnet or the quatrains-in-parallel. The quatrains here are not comparative, since direct address does not appear until after the first-quatrain, which, unlike the other two quatrains, is phrased in the first person plural.