the same understanding, “Who are the violets now/That strew the green lap of the new-come spring?” The word “gaudy” suggests richness, but not the modern meaning of “vulgar excess”. The word “only” means “supreme”, as it is also used in the dedication of the quarto (the “only begetter”). "Within thine own bud buriest thy content", suggests the youth keeps his beauty and life to himself, instead of letting the world see it in bloom. The word "buriest" suggests the youth digging his own grave. According to Philip J.T. Martin, in this line "content" means "'all that he contains', which of course includes the power to beget children, and at the same time it means his 'contentment', now and more especially in the future, and the contentment which he could give to others". In the next line, "and, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding", the speaker uses the paradox of the tender churl that makes waste in niggarding as the beginning of the turning point for the sonnet. Helen Vendler considers that quatrain three is used as a "delay in wonder and admiration" of the youth by the speaker. Philip Martin describes the third quatrain as a "tone of self-love, as the poet sees it in the youth" and it is "not praise alone, nor blame alone; not one and then the other; but both at once". Couplet Shakespeare contrasts the allusions to famine in the second quatrain with an allusion of gluttony by saying that the young man is "eat[ing] the world's due" if he were to die without offspring. The rhythmic structure of the couplet (particularly "by the grave and thee") suggests Shakespeare's "consummate ability to mimic colloquial speech so that the sonnet sounds personal and conversational, rather than sententious", and that upon first reading, one may be granted the ability to absorb more of the author's message as opposed to a close contextual reading. References Further reading Baldwin, T. W. On the Literary Genetics of Shakspeare's Sonnets. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950. Hubler, Edwin. The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952. External links An analysis and paraphrase of the sonnet Shakespeare's sonnets.com on Sonnet 1 British poems Sonnets by William Shakespeare