by Homer
Air, would I might triumph so! 10
But, alack, my hand is sworn
Ne’er to pluck thee from thy thorn:
Vow, alack, for youth unmeet;
Youth so apt to pluck a sweet.
Do not call it sin in me 15
That I am forsworn for thee:
Thou for whom e’en Jove would swear
Juno but an Ethiope were,
And deny himself for Jove,
Turning mortal for thy love. 20
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Take, O Take
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
TAKE, O take those lips away
That so sweetly were forsworn,
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn:
But my kisses bring again, 5
Bring again —
Seals of love, but seal’d in vain,
Seal’d in vain!
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Crabbed Age and Youth
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
CRABBED Age and Youth
Cannot live together:
Youth is full of pleasance,
Age is full of care;
Youth like summer morn, 5
Age like winter weather,
Youth like summer brave,
Age like winter bare:
Youth is full of sport,
Age’s breath is short, 10
Youth is nimble, Age is lame:
Youth is hot and bold,
Age is weak and cold,
Youth is wild, and Age is tame: —
Age, I do abhor thee, 15
Youth, I do adore thee;
O! my Love, my Love is young!
Age, I do defy thee —
O sweet shepherd, hie thee,
For methinks thou stay’st too long. 20
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Amiens’ Song
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
BLOW, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen
Because thou art not seen, 5
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh ho! sing heigh ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh ho! the holly!
This life is most jolly. 10
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp 15
As friend remember’d not.
Heigh ho! sing heigh ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh ho! the holly!
This life is most jolly. 20
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Dawn Song
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
HARK! hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings,
And Phœbus ‘gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin 5
To ope their golden eyes:
With everything that pretty bin,
My lady sweet, arise!
Arise, arise!
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Dirge of Love
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
COME away, come away, Death,
And in sad cypres let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, 5
O prepare it!
My part of death no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet
On my black coffin let there be strown; 10
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown;
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O where
Sad true lover never find my grave, 15
To weep there.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Fidele’s Dirge
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
FEAR no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must, 5
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o’ the great,
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak: 10
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning-flash
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash; 15
Thou hast finish’d joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee! 20
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
A Sea Dirge
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
FULL fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change 5
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Hark! now I hear them, —
Ding, dong, bell.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Eighteenth Sonnet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
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, 5
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 owest; 10
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Twenty-ninth Sonnet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
WHEN in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
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, 5
Featured like him, like him with friends possest,
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, 10
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.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Thirtieth Sonnet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
WHEN to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste;
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, 5
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long-since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er 10
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before:
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored, and sorrows end.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Thirty-first Sonnet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
THY bosom is endearèd with all hearts
Which I, by lacking, have supposèd dead:
And there reigns Love, and all Love’s loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought burièd.
How many a holy and obsequious tear 5
Hath dear religious love stol’n from mine eye,
As interest of the dead! — which now appear
But things removed that hidden in thee lie.
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, 10
Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
That due of many now is thine alone:
Their images I loved I view in thee,
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Thirty-second Sonnet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
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 deceaséd lover;
Compare them with the bettering of the time, 5
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, 10
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’.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Thirty-third Sonnet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
FULL many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride 5
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendour on my brow; 10
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region-cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Fifty-fourth Sonnet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
O HOW much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The Rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
The Canker-blooms have full as deep a dye 5
As the perfumèd tincture of the Roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer’s breath their maskèd buds discloses;
But — for their virtue only is their show —
They live unwoo’d and unrespected fade, 10
Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made.
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, my verse distils your truth.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Fifty-fifth Sonnet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
NOT marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn, 5
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room 10
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Fifty-seventh Sonnet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
BEING your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend
Nor services to do, till you require:
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour 5
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu:
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose, 10
But like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save, where you are, how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love, that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Sixtieth Sonnet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
LIKE as the waves make towards the pebbled shore
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity once in the main of light, 5
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight,
And Time, that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow; 10
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Sixty-fourth Sonnet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
WHEN I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal, slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain 5
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay, 10
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate —
That Time will come and take my Love away:
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Sixty-fifth Sonnet
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
SINCE brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,