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OF SHAKESPEARE

119

WHEN

TIME AND LOVE

HEN I have seen by Time's fell hand de-
faced

The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store ;

When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,-
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That Time will come and take my Love away :

-This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

120

SONGS AND SONNETS

TIME AND LOVE

SINCE brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless

sea,

But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

O fearful meditation; where, alack,

Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back? Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid ?

O, none, unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my Love may still shine bright.

OF SHAKESPEARE

121

THE WORLD'S WAY

TIRED with all these, for restful death I cry,—
As, to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,

And captive Good attending captain Ill :

-Tired with all these, from these would I be

gone,-

Save that, to die, I leave my Love alone.

122

SONGS AND SONNETS

THE ONE AND ONLY

AH! wherefore with infection should he live,
And with his presence grace impiety,

That sin by him advantage should achieve
And lace itself with his society?

Why should false painting imitate his cheek

And steal dead seeing of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek

Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?

Why should he live, now Nature bankrupt is,
Beggar'd of blood to blush through lively veins ?
For she hath no exchequer now but his,
And, proud of many, lives upon his gains.

O! him she stores, to show what wealth she had In days long since, before these last so bad.

AGE UNSHAMED

HUS is his cheek the map of days outworn,

THUS

When beauty lived and died as flowers do

now,

Before these bastard signs of fair were born,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;

Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away
To live a second life on second head;

Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay:

In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself and true,
Making no summer of another's green,
Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;

And him as for a map doth Nature store,
To show false Art what beauty was of yore.

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