Beauty

No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace, As I have seen in one autumnal face.

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

But he who loveliness within Hath found, all outward loathes, For he who color loves, and skin, Loves but their oldest clothes.

There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple: If the ill spirit have so fair a house, Good things will strive to dwell with ’t.

The fringed curtains of thine eye advance.

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.

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.

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.

Sweets grown common lose their dear delight.

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.

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.

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.

From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauty’s rose might never die.

An angel! or, if not, An earthly paragon!

As chaste as unsunn’d snow.

Hark! hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings, And Phoebus ’gins arise, His steeds to water at those springs On chalic’d flowers that lies; And winking Mary-buds begin To ope their golden eyes: With everything that pretty is, My lady sweet, arise.

See, where she comes apparell’d like the spring.

Chaste as the icicle That’s curdied by the frost from purest snow, And hangs on Dian’s temple.