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Home  »  English Poetry I  »  118. Sixty-fourth Sonnet

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

William Shakespeare

118. Sixty-fourth Sonnet

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

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.