A Hundred Great Poems

Shakespeare

SONNET XVIII

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 dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd,
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; *
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest 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.

*That fair thou owest = the beauty thou hast.

SONNET XXIX

WHEN, in disgrace with Fortune and men's

eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possest,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising-
Haply I think on thee: and then my state,
Like to the Lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven's gate; For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with Kings.

SONNET XXX

HEN to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long-since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense * of many a vanish'd
sight:

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before:
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored, and sorrows end.

* Expense = loss.

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