Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,'
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time, that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow;
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet, to times in hope, my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
Is it thy will thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
While shadows, like to thee, do mock my sight?
Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee
So far from home, into my deeds to pry ;
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?
O no! thy love, though much, is not so great;
It is my love that keeps mine eyé awake ;
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,
To play the watchman ever for thy sake:
For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere, From me far off, with others all-too-near.
1 Main of light. As the main of waters would signify the great body of waters, so the main of light signifies the mass or flood of light, into which a new-born child is launched.
2 Parallels. We have exactly the same idea in the 2d Sonnet :
"When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field."
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious1 is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account,
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary 1 read,
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
'Tis thee (myself) that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
Against my love shall be, as I am now,
With Time's injurious hand crushed and o'erworn ; When hours have drained his blood, and filled his
With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
Hath travelled on to age's steepy night ;
And all those beauties, whereof now he 's king,
Are vanishing or vanished out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
2 Beated. So in the old copy; and it has been followed by Malone. He suggests that the true word may be bated; but he receives beated as the participle of the verb to beat.
3 Steepy night. It has been proposed to read sleepy night; but in the 7th Sonnet we have the same notion of man climbing up the hill of age; and here the idea is also connected with the antithesis of morn and night.
For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding age's cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life.
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them, still green.
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-rased,
And brass eternal, slave to mortal rage ;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat'ry main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay ;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate -
That time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
O, fearful meditation! where, alack!
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?1 Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back? Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, —
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honor 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 miscalled simplicity,2
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I begone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
Ah! wherefore with infection should he live,
And with his presence grace impiety,
1 In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses says,
"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
In which he puts alms for oblivion."
Time's chest and Time's wallet are the same; they are the depositories of what was once great and beautiful, passed away, perished, and forgotten.
2 Simplicity is here used for folly.
That sin by him advantage should achieve,
And lace1 itself with his society?
Why should false painting imitate his cheek,
And steal dead seeing of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
Why should he live now Nature bankrupt is,
Beggared of blood to blush through lively veins?
For she hath no exchequer now but his,
And, proud of many, lives upon his gains.
O, him she stores, to show what wealth she had
In days long since, before these last so bad.
Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty lived and died as flowers do
Before these bastard signs of fair2 were borne,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head,
Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay:
In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself, and true,
Making no summer of another's green,
Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;
And him as for a map doth Nature store,
To show false Art what beauty was of
1 Lace, embellish, ornament.
2 Fair, beauty.
3 See Merchant of Venice, Illustrations of Act III.
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