Selected Sonnets of William Shakespeare

Sonnet LXXI: No Longer Mourn for me when I am Dead

By William Shakespeare 1564—1616

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Than you shall hear the surly sudden bell

Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:

Nay, if you read this line, remember not

The hand that write it; for I love you so

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot

If thinking on me then should make you woe.

O, if, I say, you look upon this verse

When I perhaps compounded am with clay,

Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,

But let your love even with my life decay,

Lest the wise world should look into your moan

And mock you with me after I am gone.

Sonnet CXLVI: Poor Soul, the Centre of my Sinful Earth

Poor soul the centre of my sinful earth,

My sinful earth these rebel powers array,

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 loss,

And let that pine to aggravate thy store;

Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;

Within be fed, without be rich no more,

So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,

And, Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

Sonnet CVI: When in the Chronicle of Wasted Time

When in the chronicle of wasted time

I see descriptions of the fairest wights,

And beauty making beautiful old rhyme

In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,

Then, in the blazon 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 but with divining eyes,

They had not skill enough your worth to sing:

For we, which now behold these present days,

Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

Sonnet XXXII: If thou Survive my Well-contented Day

If thou survive my well-contented day,

When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,

And shalt by fortune once more re-survey

These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,

Compare them with the bettering of the time,

And though they be outstripp’d by every pen,

Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,

Exceeded by the height of happier men.

O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:

“Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age

A dearer birth than this his love had brought,

To march in ranks of better equipage:

But since he died and poets better prove,

Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love.”

Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.