The Complete Works of William Shakespeare · William Shakespeare
17
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 say this poet lies, 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 stretched 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 shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed, 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 ow’st, Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st, 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 rolling: 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 pleasure, Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.
So is it not with me as with that muse, Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse, Who heaven it self for ornament doth use, And every fair with his fair doth rehearse, Making a couplement of proud compare With sun and moon, with earth and sea’s rich gems: With April’s first-born flowers and all things rare, That heaven’s air in this huge rondure 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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.