Others

You taught me language; and my profit on ’t Is, I know how to curse: the red plague rid you, For learning me your language!

Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me, From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.

My library Was dukedom large enough.

Lawn as white as driven snow.

When you do dance, I wish you A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that.

It is a heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in ’t.

The silence often of pure innocence Persuades when speaking fails.

Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth.

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red: If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rime, In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have express’d Even such a beauty as you master now.

Sweets grown common lose their dear delight.

To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I ey’d, Such seems your beauty still.

They are the lords and owners of their faces, Others but stewards of their excellence. The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet, Though to itself it only live and die.

Who is it that says most? which can say more Than this rich praise,—that you alone are you?

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rime.

Be thou the tenth Muse.

Be thou the tenth Muse.

Be thou the tenth Muse.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade.

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.

Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly? Sweets with sweet war not, joy delights in joy.

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field.