The Sonnets

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.

Accuse me thus, that I have scanted all,

Wherein I should your great deserts repay,

Forgot upon your dearest love to call, 

Whereto all bonds do tie me day by day,

That I have frequent been with unknown minds,

And given to time your own dear-purchased right,

That I have hoisted sail to all the winds

Which should transport me farthest from your sight.

Book both my wilfulness and errors down,

And on just proof surmise, accumulate,

Bring me within the level of your frown,

But shoot not at me in your wakened hate:

Since my appeal says I did strive to prove

The constancy and virtue of your love.

Like as to make our appetite more keen

With eager compounds we our palate urge,

As to prevent our maladies unseen,

We sicken to shun sickness when we purge.

Even so being full of your ne'er-cloying sweetness,

To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding;

And sick of welfare found a kind of meetness, 

To be diseased ere that there was true needing.

Thus policy in love t' anticipate

The ills that were not, grew to faults assured,

And brought to medicine a healthful state

Which rank of goodness would by ill be cured.

But thence I learn and find the lesson true,

Drugs poison him that so feil sick of you.

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears

Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within,

Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,

Still losing when I saw my self to win!

What wretched errors hath my heart committed,

Whilst it hath thought it self so blessed never!

How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted

In the distraction of this madding fever!

O benefit of ill, now I find true

That better is, by evil still made better.

And ruined love when it is built anew 

Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.

So I return rebuked to my content,

And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.

That you were once unkind befriends me now,

And for that sorrow, which I then did feel,

Needs must I under my transgression bow,

Unless my nerves were brass or hammered steel.

For if you were by my unkindness shaken

As I by yours, y'have passed a hell of time,

And I a tyrant have no leisure taken

To weigh how once I suffered in your crime.

O that our night of woe might have remembered

My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits,

And soon to you, as you to me then tendered

The humble salve, which wounded bosoms fits!

But that your trespass now becomes a fee,

Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.

'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,

When not to be, receives reproach of being,

And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed,

Not by our feeling, but by others' seeing.

For why should others' false adulterate eyes

Give salutation to my sportive blood?

Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,

Which in their wills count bad what I think good?

No, I am that I am, and they that level

At my abuses, reckon up their own,

I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;

By their rank thoughts, my deeds must not be shown

Unless this general evil they maintain,

All men are bad and in their badness reign.

Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain

Full charactered with lasting memory,

Which shall above that idle rank remain 

Beyond all date even to eternity.

Or at the least, so long as brain and heart

Have faculty by nature to subsist,

Till each to razed oblivion yield his part

Of thee, thy record never can be missed:

That poor retention could not so much hold,

Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score,

Therefore to give them from me was I bold,

To trust those tables that receive thee more:

To keep an adjunct to remember thee

Were to import forgetfulness in me.

No! Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change,

Thy pyramids built up with newer might

To me are nothing novel, nothing strange,

They are but dressings Of a former sight:

Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire,

What thou dost foist upon us that is old,

And rather make them born to our desire, 

Than think that we before have heard them told:

Thy registers and thee I both defy,

Not wond'ring at the present, nor the past,

For thy records, and what we see doth lie,

Made more or less by thy continual haste:

This I do vow and this shall ever be,

I will be true despite thy scythe and thee.

If my dear love were but the child of state,

It might for Fortune's bastard be unfathered,

As subject to time's love or to time's hate,

Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered.

No it was builded far from accident,

It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls

Under the blow of thralled discontent,

Whereto th' inviting time our fashion calls:

It fears not policy that heretic,

Which works on leases of short-numbered hours,

But all alone stands hugely politic, 

That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.

To this I witness call the fools of time,

Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.

Were't aught to me I bore the canopy,

With my extern the outward honouring,

Or laid great bases for eternity,

Which proves more short than waste or ruining?

Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour

Lose all, and more by paying too much rent

For compound sweet; forgoing simple savour,

Pitiful thrivers in their gazing spent?

No, let me be obsequious in thy heart,

And take thou my oblation, poor but free,

Which is not mixed with seconds, knows no art,

But mutual render, only me for thee.

Hence, thou suborned informer, a true soul

When most impeached, stands least in thy control.

O thou my lovely boy who in thy power,

Dost hold Time's fickle glass his fickle hour:

Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st,

Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow'st.

If Nature (sovereign mistress over wrack)

As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back,

She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill

May time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill.

Yet fear her O thou minion of her pleasure,

She may detain, but not still keep her treasure!

Her audit (though delayed) answered must be,

And her quietus is to render thee.

In the old age black was not counted fair,

Or if it were it bore not beauty's name:

But now is black beauty's successive heir,

And beauty slandered with a bastard shame,

For since each hand hath put on nature's power, 

Fairing the foul with art's false borrowed face,