Page:Shakespeare's Sonnets (1923) Yale.djvu/42

32 

Against my love shall be, as I am now,

With Time's injurious hand crush'd and o'erworn;

When hours have drain'd his blood and fill'd his brow

With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn

Hath travell'd on to age's steepy night;

And all those beauties whereof now he's king

Are vanishing or vanish'd out of sight,

Stealing away the treasure of his spring;

For such a time do I now fortify

Against confounding age's cruel knife,

That he shall never cut from memory

My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life:

His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,

And they shall live, and he in them still green.

 

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd

The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-raz'd,

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

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;

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.

 1 Against: when, in anticipation of the time when

5 steepy: steep, surmounted with difficulty

10 confounding: destroying

12 though: though he cuts  2 rich-proud age: costly and splendid tombs or monuments

3 sometime: once, formerly

4 brass eternal slave: eternal brass the slave

9 state: condition of things

10 state itself: grandeur

13 which: this thought which 