SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
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,
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
I lift the Lord on high,
Under the murmuring hemlock boughs, and see
The small birds of the forest lingering by
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad…
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my Gates,
And my divine Althea brings
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
Fair tree! for thy delightful shade
’Tis just that some return be made;
Sure some return is due from me
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,
There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
