Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
Before these bastard signs of fair were born,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head;
Ere beauty’s dead fleece made another gay: 
In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself and true,
Making no summer of another’s green,
Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;
  And him as for a map doth Nature store,
  To show false Art what beauty was of yore.

LXIX

Those parts of thee that the world’s eye doth view
Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend;
All tongues—­the voice of souls—­give thee that due,
Uttering bare truth, even so as foes commend. 
Thy outward thus with outward praise is crown’d;
But those same tongues, that give thee so thine own,
In other accents do this praise confound
By seeing farther than the eye hath shown. 
They look into the beauty of thy mind,
And that in guess they measure by thy deeds;
Then—­churls—­their thoughts, although their eyes were kind,
To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds: 
  But why thy odour matcheth not thy show,
  The soil is this, that thou dost common grow.

LXX

That thou art blam’d shall not be thy defect,
For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair;
The ornament of beauty is suspect,
A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air. 
So thou be good, slander doth but approve
Thy worth the greater being woo’d of time;
For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love,
And thou present’st a pure unstained prime. 
Thou hast passed by the ambush of young days
Either not assail’d, or victor being charg’d;
Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise,
To tie up envy, evermore enlarg’d,
  If some suspect of ill mask’d not thy show,
  Then thou alone kingdoms of hearts shouldst owe.

LXXI

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell: 
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe. 
O! if,—­I say you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
But let your love even with my life decay;
  Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
  And mock you with me after I am gone.

LXXII