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To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
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2
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When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
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And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
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Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,
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Will be a tattered weed of small worth held:
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Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
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Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
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To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
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Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
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How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,
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If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
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Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’
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Proving his beauty by succession thine.
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This were to be new made when thou art old,
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And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.
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3
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Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,
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Now is the time that face should form another,
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Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
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Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
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For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
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Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
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Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
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Of his self-love to stop posterity?
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Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee
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Calls back the lovely April of her prime,
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So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
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Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
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But if thou live remembered not to be,
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Die single and thine image dies with thee.
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4
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Unthrifty loveliness why dost thou spend,
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Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?
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Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
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And being frank she lends to those are free:
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Then beauteous niggard why dost thou abuse,
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The bounteous largess given thee to give?
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Profitless usurer why dost thou use
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So great a sum of sums yet canst not live?
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For having traffic with thyself alone,
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Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive,
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Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
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What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
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Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
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Which used lives th’ executor to be.
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5
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Those hours that with gentle work did frame
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The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell
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Will play the tyrants to the very same,
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And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
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For never-resting time leads summer on
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To hideous winter and confounds him there,
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Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
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Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness every where:
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Then were not summer’s distillation left
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A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
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Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,
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Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
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But flowers distilled though they with winter meet,
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Leese but their show, their substance still lives sweet.
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6
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Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface,
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In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled:
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Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place,
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With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-killed:
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That use is not forbidden usury,
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Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
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That’s for thyself to breed another thee,
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Or ten times happier be it ten for one,
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Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,
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If ten of thine ten times refigured thee:
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Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
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Leaving thee living in posterity?
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Be not self-willed for thou art much too fair,
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To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.
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7
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Lo in the orient when the gracious light
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Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
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Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,
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Serving with looks his sacred majesty,
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And having climbed the steep-up heavenly hill,
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