By Naveed Riaz

The world remembers Shakespeare as the most distinguished playwright of all time; however, he was equally revered as a poet in his lifetime. His first two books of poetry, Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, were reprinted many times. They were more prevalent in print than in any of Shakespeare’s plays. Numerous of the earliest literary pundits and anthologists of English-language verse cited these two narrative poems because of their illustrative lines. Like his plays, his poetic verses were equally imaginative, universal and coherent. 

Here is one of William Shakespeare’s sonnets explaining life’s beautiful message.

From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

But as the riper should by time decrease,

His tender heir mught bear his memeory:

But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

Feed’st thy light’st 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, makest waste in niggarding.

Pity the world, or else this glutton be,

To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

We want all gorgeous creatures to imitate themselves so that beauty’s flower will not die out, but as an older man dies in time, he leaves a young heir to carry on his remembrance. But you, concerned only with your own stunning eyes, provide the bright light of life with self-regarding fuel, making looks shallow by your preoccupation with your looks. In this, you are your enemy, being harsh to yourself. You, the world’s most beautiful ornament and the chief messenger of spring, are burying your gifts within yourself. And, dear selfish one, you are wasting that beauty because you decline to reproduce. Take pity on the world, or else be the glutton who consumes, with the grave, what belongs to the world.