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Home  »  English Poetry I  »  110. Thirtieth Sonnet

English Poetry I: From Chaucer to Gray.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.

William Shakespeare

110. Thirtieth Sonnet

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,

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

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.