That you were once unkind befriends me now,
And for that sorrow, which I then did feel,
Needs must I under my transgression bow,
Unless my nerves were brass or hammer’d steel. 
For if you were by my unkindness shaken,
As I by yours, you’ve pass’d a hell of time;
And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken
To weigh how once I suffer’d in your crime. 
O! that our night of woe might have remember’d
My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits,
And soon to you, as you to me, then tender’d
The humble salve, which wounded bosoms fits! 
  But that your trespass now becomes a fee;
  Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.

CXXI

’Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d,
When not to be receives reproach of being;
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deem’d
Not by our feeling, but by others’ seeing: 
For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood? 
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good? 
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own: 
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts, my deeds must not be shown;
  Unless this general evil they maintain,
  All men are bad and in their badness reign.

CXXII

Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full character’d with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain,
Beyond all date; even to eternity: 
Or, at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to raz’d oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be miss’d. 
That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score;
Therefore to give them from me was I bold,
To trust those tables that receive thee more: 
  To keep an adjunct to remember thee
  Were to import forgetfulness in me.

CXXIII

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change: 
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight. 
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old;
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told. 
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste. 
  This I do vow and this shall ever be;
  I will be true despite thy scythe and thee.

CXXIV