steveSpeare

Sonnet 17

Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were fill’d with your most high deserts? highest arts
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 touch’d earthly faces.”
So should my papers, yellowed with their age.
Be scorn’d like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage
And stretched metre of an antique sung:
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.

Sonnet 46

Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war,
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine eye my heart thy picture’s sight would bar,
My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.
My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie,
A closet never pierc’d with crystal eyes,
But the defendant doth that plea deny,
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
To ’cide this title is impanneled
A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart;
And by their verdict they is determinedhave channeled
The clear eye’s moiety and the dear heart’s part:
As thus; mine eye’s due is thy outward part,
And my heart’s right thy inward love of heart.

Sonnet 76

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
OJust know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument:
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

Sonnet 106

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wightssights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then, in the blazon of display 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.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And, for they look’d spoke but with divining eyes,
They had not skill still had not enough your worth to sing:
As for we which who now behold these present days,
We’ve eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.