The Sonnets

Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,

The eyes, ‘fore duteous, now converted are

From his low tract and look another way;

So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon,

Unlook’d on diest, unless thou get a son.

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Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?

Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.

Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,

Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?

If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,

By unions married, do offend thine ear,

They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds

In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.

Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,

Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;

Resembling sire, and child, and happy mother,

Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing;

Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,

Sings this to thee: ‘Thou single wilt prove none’.

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Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye

That thou consum’st thyself in single life?

Ah! if thou issueless shall hap to die,

The world will wail thee like a makeless wife:

The world will be thy widow, and still weep

That thou no form of thee hast left behind,

When every private widow well may keep,

By children’s eyes, her husband’s shape in mind.

Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend

Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;

But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,

And kept unus’d, the user so destroys it.

No love toward others in that bosom sits

That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.

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For shame! deny that thou bear’st love to any,

Who for thy self art so unprovident.

Grant, if thou wilt, thou art belov’d of many,

But that thou none lov’st is most evident;

For thou art so possess’d with murd’rous hate

That ‘gainst thyself thou stick’st not to conspire,

Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate

Which to repair should be thy chief desire.

O, change thy thought, that I may change my mind!

Shall hate be fairer lodg’d than gentle love?

Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,

Or to thy self at least kind-hearted prove;

Make thee an other self for love of me,

That beauty still may live in thine or thee.