From fairest creatures we desire increase

A recitation in a general sense is the act of reciting from memory, or a formal reading of verse or other writing before an audience
Recitation is practiced as a performing art especially in Bangladesh and India. Nowadays it is a popular art form in Bengal. The reciters recite Bengali poems on stage and electronic media. Shambhu Mitra, Kazi Sabyasachi, Pradeep Ghosh, Partha Ghhosh, Gauri Ghosh, Utpal Kundu are great reciters from West Bengal. Reciters like Samiran Sanyal, Bratati Bandyopadhyay, Bijoylakshmi Burman, Pinaki Chattopadhyay, Sutapa Bandyopadhyay, Urmimala Basu, Samya Karpha to name a few, are contributing significantly in this field. There are many such organizations of recitation, with most located in Bangladesh.
It was often popular for a poet to recite his or her newly-created poetry to an audience. In the early twentieth century, recitation developed into an autonomous art form.
Recitationes were a common way for Roman poets to test and publicize their works.
Shakespeare's sonnets are poems written by William Shakespeare on a variety of themes. When discussing or referring to Shakespeare's sonnets, it is almost always a reference to the 154 sonnets that were first published all together in a quarto in 1609. However, there are six additional sonnets that Shakespeare wrote and included in the plays Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and Love's Labour's Lost. There is also a partial sonnet found in the play Edward III.
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.

Sonnet 1 is the first in a series of 154 sonnets written by William Shakespeare and published in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe. Nineteenth-century critics thought Thorpe might have published the poems without Shakespeare's consent, but modern scholars don't agree and consider that Thorpe maintained a good reputation. Sonnet 1 is the first of the "Fair Youth" sonnets, in which an unnamed young man is being addressed by the speaker. Patrick Cheney comments on this: "Beginning with a putatively male speaker imploring a beautiful young man to reproduce, and concluding with a series of poems – the dark lady poems – that affiliate consummated heterosexual passion with incurable disease, Shakespeare's Sonnets radically and deliberately disrupt the conventional narrative of erotic courtship". Sonnet 1 serves as being a kind of introduction to the rest of the sonnets, and may have been written later than the ones that follow. The "procreation sonnets" (sonnets 1 – 17) urge this youth to not waste his beauty by failing to marry or reproduce. Joseph Pequigney notes: "the opening movement give[s the] expression to one compelling case... The first mode of preservation entertained is procreation, which is urged without letup in the first fourteen poems and twice again".

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gaz’d on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.
Sonnet 2 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet, which consists of three quatrains followed by a couplet. It follows the form's typical rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Like all but one sonnet in the sequence, it is written in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions
Shakespeare's Sonnet 2 is the second procreation sonnet. It urges the young man to have a child and thereby protect himself from reproach by preserving his beauty against Time's destruction.
Sonnet 2 begins with a military siege metaphor, something that occurs often in sonnets and poetry — from Virgil (‘he ploughs the brow with furrows’) and Ovid (‘furrows which may plough your body will come already’) to Shakespeare's contemporary, Drayton, “The time-plow’d furrows in thy fairest field.” The image is used here as a metaphor for a wrinkled brow. Trenches are also carved into a field when a farmer plows, and the agricultural connotation is touched on two lines later with the image of worthless weeds.
Livery is usually a uniform for a butler or soldier, which may suggest that the young man's beauty does not belong to him.
In the second quatrain, it points out that when the young man is old and asked where his beauty went, and he must then answer that his treasure is found only in his own self-absorbed “deep sunken” eyes, it would be a shame.
The third quatrain suggests that this waste and shame could be avoided if the young man were to have a child who could inherit his beauty.
Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb,
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime:
So thou through windows of thine age shall see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remember’d not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.
In the sonnet, the speaker is urging the man being addressed to preserve something of himself and something of the image he sees in the mirror by fathering a child. The “young man” of this and other sonnets is a subject of debate. Some think it may be based on William Herbert, others consider Henry Wriothesley. There are other candidates as well.