且听风吟

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 dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed:

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.

For as you were when first your eye I ey’d,

Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,

Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,

Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d,

In process of the seasons have I seen,

Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,

Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.

Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,

Steal from his figure and no pace perceiv’d;

So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,

Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceiv’d:

 For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred;

 Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang;

In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self that seals up all in rest;

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by;

 This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

 To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red:

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound:

I grant I never saw a goddess go,

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

 And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

 As any she belied with false compare.

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

 For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings

 That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

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.

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;

Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,

Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait,

On purpose laid to make the taker mad:

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof, and prov’d, a very woe;

Before, a joy propos’d; behind, a dream.

 All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

 To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.