thing at the same time. Such is true with the word content in this poem (line 11). The word can suggests contents (what something contains), but it can also suggest the idea of being content (or being happy). The line means then both of the following:
At the end of the quatrain (line 12), the poet directly tells the young man that he is being wasteful by being so stingy ("niggarding") and so selfish with his natural gifts and potential.
In the final couplet the speaker claims that the young man cheats not only himself, but the entire world, by not having a child. Playing with language, Shakespeare sets off the idea of famine that he introduced earlier (in line 7) with the idea of gluttony (in line 13). The speaker calls the young man a glutton in the sense that the young man is keeping all of his potential (for having a child) to himself just as a glutton keeps all of the food for himself. Of course, the idea of gluttony has several connotations. As the student may recall, gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. In a sense, then, the speaker is suggesting that the young man's selfishness is also an