desires we usually associate with sonnets that no woman is even mentioned in it... But while there is no woman in this sonnet it is not the case that there is no desire. On the contrary, Shakespeare continually expresses his desire for the young man whom he calls 'beauty's rose' and who, he warns, must like a rose reproduce himself". The allusion to the rose is a particularly significant because it was uncommon for the rose, a symbol for femininity, to be used to refer to a man. At the end of the first quatrain, Shakespeare's pun on the word "tender" (to mean both the obvious meaning of youth and beauty and the less obvious sense of currency to alleviate a debt) further illustrates the beloved's need to reproduce in order to pay off his debt of chastity. The phrase “tender heir” of line 4 contains a pun as it alludes to the false etymology of the Latin word mulier (wife), from mollis aer (soft air), giving the phrase a double meaning: not only that a child will preserve his memory, but that his wife will bear that child. This pun is repeated in Shakespeare's play Cymbeline, where the etymology is discussed. Quatrain 2 In the second quatrain, the speaker says that the young man is not only betrothed to himself, but is also eating away at himself and will leave famine behind where there is abundance, thus making the young man's cruel self an enemy of his “sweet self”. Line five, "But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes", suggests the young man is pledged to himself, as in a betrothal, but reduced to the small scope of his own eyes. Shakespeare then goes on to give the imagery of a candle eating itself, "Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel", which can be tied to gluttony in the thirteenth line. In the last two lines of the second quatrain, "Making a famine where abundance lies, Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel", Shakespeare uses the contrasting images of "famine" and "abundance" and then "sweet self" and "cruel" to describe the selfishness of the young man. Quatrain 3 “Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament/And only herald to the gaudy spring” might suggest that the young man has potential as a courtier, as in Shakespeare's play Richard II, when a mother asks her son with