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Home  »  The Book of Elizabethan Verse  »  William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Elizabethan Verse. 1907.

Not Mine Own Fears

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

NOT mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,

Can yet the lease of my true love control,

Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,

And the sad augurs mock their own presage;

Incertainties now crown themselves assured,

And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

Now with the drops of this most balmy time

My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,

Since spite of him I’ll live in this poor rhyme,

While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes:

And thou in this shalt find thy monument

When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.