Neither in inward worth, nor outward fair,'
Can make you live yourself in eyes of men.
To give away yourself keeps yourself still
And you must live drawn by your own sweet skill
Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet, Heaven knows, it is but as a tomb.
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would
Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces.
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue;
And your true rights be termed a poet's rage,
And stretchéd metre of an antique song:
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice; in it, and in my rhyme
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate :
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven 2 shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
1 Fair, beauty. The word is used in the same sense in the 18th Sonnet.
"When the searching eye of heaven is hid Behind the globe, and lights the lower world."
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed; '
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons, as thou fleet'st,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world, and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime;
O, carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow,
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young.
A woman's face, with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in roll
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes, and women's souls amazeth
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women's pleas
Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treas
So is it not with me as with that muse,
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse;
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use,
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse;
Making a couplement1 of proud compare,
With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich
With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare
That heaven's air in his huge rondure2 hems.
O, let me, true in love, but truly write,
And then believe me, my love is as fair
As any mother's child, though not so bright
As those gold candles fixed in heaven's air:
Let them say more that like of hearsay well;
I will not praise, that purpose not to sell.
1 Couplement, union. So in Spenser:
"Allied with bands of mutual couplement."
2 Rondure circumference.
My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date;
But when in thee time's furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate.
For all that beauty that doth cover thee
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me;
How can I then be elder than thou art?
O, therefore, love, be of thyself so wary,
As I not for myself but for thee will;
Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary
As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.
Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain
Thou gav'st me thine, not to give back again.
As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage, Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'ercharged with burthen of mine own love's might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast;
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more ex pressed.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit
Mine eye hath played the painter, and hath stelled
Thy beauty's form in table' of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein 'tis held,
And perspective it is best painter's art.
For through the painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true image pictured lies,
Which in my bosom's shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes.
Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, where-through the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;
Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art,
They draw but what they see, know not the heart
Let those who are in favor with their stars,
Of public honor and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,
Unlooked for joy in that I honor most.
Great princes' favorites their fair leaves spread
But as the marigold at the sun's eye;
And in themselves their pride lies buried,
For at a frown they in their glory die.
1 Table. So in All's Well that Ends Well:
""Twas pretty, though a plague,
To see him every hour; to sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,
In our heart's table."
Table, though sometimes used in the sense of a picture, more commonly means the tabular surface upon which a picture is painted.
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