Love Poems by William
Shakespeare (1564 -1616)
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Shall I Compare Thee, (Sonnet XVIII)
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Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou are 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.
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Sonnet CXVI
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Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love,
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh, 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 is 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.
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Tell her that's young
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Tell her that's young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung,
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died
Small is the worth,
Of beauty from the light retired,
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not to blush so to be admired.
Then die - that she,
The common fate of all things rare,
May read in thee,
How small a part of time they share,
That are so wondrous sweet and fair !
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Sonnet CXXX
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My mistress' eyes are
nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts be 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.
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More Poems
by William Shakespeare
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