Page:Shakespeare's Sonnets (1923) Yale.djvu/41

Shakespeare's Sonnets 

Is it thy will thy image should keep open

My heavy eyelids to the weary night?

Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,

While shadows, like to thee, do mock my sight?

Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee

So far from home, into my deeds to pry,

To find out shames and idle hours in me,

The scope and tenour of thy jealousy?

O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great:

It is my love that keeps mine eye awake;

Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,

To play the watchman ever for thy sake:

For thee watch I whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,

From me far off, with others all too near.

 

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye

And all my soul and all my every part;

And for this sin there is no remedy,

It is so grounded inward in my heart.

Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,

No shape so true, no truth of such account;

And for myself mine own worth do define,

As I all other in all worths surmount.

But when my glass shows me myself indeed,

Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity,

Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;

Self so self-loving were iniquity.

'Tis thee, myself,—that for myself I praise,

Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

 8 scope and tenour: aim and substance

11 defeat: destroy  7 do define: I do define

8 As: so that

other: others

10 Beated and chopp'd: battered (?) and chapped; Cf. n.

antiquity: old age 