How can my muse want subject to invent,

Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,And burn the long-lived phoenix, in her blood,Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,And do whate’er thou wilt swift-footed TimeTo the wide world and all her fading sweets.But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:O carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,Nor draw no…

If not from my love’s breath? The purple prideWhich on thy soft check for complexion dwellsIn my love’s veins thou hast too grossly dyed.’The lily I condemnèd for thy hand,And buds of marjoram had stol’n thy hair;The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,One blushing shame, another white despair;A third, nor red, nor white, had stol’n…

And for the peace of you I hold such strifeAs ‘twixt a miser and his wealth is found.Now proud as an enjoyer, and anonDoubting the filching age will steal his treasure;Now counting best to be with you alone,Then bettered that the world may see my pleasure;Sometimes all full with feasting on your sight,And by and…

Who, therefore angry, seems to part in sunder,Swelling on either side to want his bliss;Between whose hills her head entombed is;Where like a virtuous monument she lies,To be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes.Without the bed her other fair hand was,On the green coverlet, whose perfect whiteShowed like an April daisy on the grass,With pearly sweat…

Spied a blossom passing fairPlaying in the wanton air:Through the velvet leaves the windAll unseen ‘gan passage find;That the lover, sick to death,Wish’d himself the heaven’s breath.Air, quoth he, thy cheeks may blow;Air, would I might triumph so!But, alack, my hand is swornNe’er to pluck thee from thy thorn:Vow, alack, for youth unmeet;Youth so apt…

So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite,Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit,Or any of these all, or all, or more,Entitled in thy parts do crowned sit,I make my love engrafted to this store:So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised,Whilst that this shadow…

To make me give the lie to my true sight,And swear that brightness doth not grace the day?Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill,That in the very refuse of thy deedsThere is such strength and warrantise of skillThat, in my mind, thy worst all best exceeds?Who taught thee how to make me love thee…

Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.For where is she so fair whose unear’d wombDisdains the tillage of thy husbandry?Or who is he so fond will be the tombOf his self-love, to stop posterity?Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in theeCalls back the lovely April of…

Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies,Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child…

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!What old December’s bareness everywhere!And yet this time removed was summer’s time,The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,Like widowed wombs after their lords’ decease:Yet this abundant issue seemed to meBut hope of orphans, and unfathered fruit,For summer and his pleasures wait…

And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,And purest faith unhappily forsworn,And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,And strength by limping sway disabled,And art made tongue-tied by authority,And folly doctor-like controlling skill,And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,And captive good attending captain ill:Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,Save that,…

Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!O, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!That tongue that tells the story of thy days,Making lascivious comments on thy sport,Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise;Naming thy name blesses an ill report.O, what a mansion have those vices gotWhich for their habitation chose out thee,Where…

Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?Why so large cost, having so short a lease,Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s lossAnd let that pine to aggravate thy store;Buy…