May 20 The Harvard Classics, fifteen minutes a day
Shakespeare’s Finest Work
The most concentrated beauty of Shakespeare’s unbounded creative genius is found in his sonnets. Written as personal messages to friends and not intended for publication, they reveal the inner Shakespeare more truly than do any of his great plays.
- Sonnets entered in the London Stationers’ Register, May 20. 1609.
From the 1930 Reading Guide
Sonnets
William Shakespeare
The reading starts at “107 A Sea Dirge” at the top of page 270.
107 A Sea Dirge
FULL fathom five thy father lies:Of his bones are coral made;Those are pearls that were his eyes:Nothing of him that doth fade,But doth suffer a sea-changeInto something rich and strange.Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:Hark! now I hear them,—Ding, dong, bell.
108 Eighteenth Sonnet
SHALL I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate;Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimm’d:And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d.But thy eternal summer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shadeWhen in eternal lines to time thou growest.So long as men can breathe, or eyes can seeSo long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
109 Twenty-ninth Sonnet
WHEN in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyesI all alone beweep my outcast state,And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,And look upon myself, and curse my fate;Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,Featured like him, like him with friends possest,Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,With what I most enjoy contented least;Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,Haply I think on thee—and then my state,Like to the lark at break of day arisingFrom sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;For thy sweet love remember’d, such wealth bringsThat then I scorn to change my state with kings.
110 Thirtieth Sonnet
WHEN to the sessions of sweet silent thoughtI 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’erThe 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.
111 Thirty-first Sonnet
THY bosom is endearèd with all heartsWhich I, by lacking, have supposèd dead:And there reigns Love, and all Love’s loving parts,And all those friends which I thought burièd.How many a holy and obsequious tearHath dear religious love stol’n from mine eye,As interest of the dead!—which now appearBut things removed that hidden in thee lie.Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,Who all their parts of me to thee did give;That due of many now is thine alone:Their images I loved I view in thee,And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.
112 Thirty-second Sonnet
IF thou survive my well-contented dayWhen that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,And shalt by fortune once more re-surveyThese poor rude lines of thy deceaséd lover;Compare them with the bettering of the time,And though they be outstripp’d by every pen,Reserve them for my love, not for their rhymeExceeded by the height of happier men.O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought—‘Had my friend’s muse grown with this growing age,A dearer birth than this his love had brought,To march in ranks of better equipage:But since he died, and poets better prove,Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love.’
113 Thirty-third Sonnet
FULL many a glorious morning have I seenFlatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,Kissing with golden face the meadows green,Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;Anon permit the basest clouds to rideWith ugly rack on his celestial face,And from the forlorn world his visage hide,Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:Even so my sun one early morn did shineWith all-triumphant splendour on my brow;But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;The region-cloud hath mask’d him from me now.Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.
114 Fifty-fourth Sonnet
O HOW much more doth beauty beauteous seemBy that sweet ornament which truth doth give!The Rose looks fair, but fairer we it deemFor that sweet odour which doth in it live.The Canker-blooms have full as deep a dyeAs the perfumèd tincture of the Roses,Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonlyWhen summer’s breath their maskèd buds discloses;But—for their virtue only is their show—They live unwoo’d and unrespected fade,Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so;Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made.And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,When that shall fade, my verse distils your truth.
115 Fifty-fifth Sonnet
NOT marble, nor the gilded monumentsOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;But you shall shine more bright in these contentsThan unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.When wasteful war shall statues overturn,And broils root out the work of masonry,Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory.’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmityShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterityThat wear this world out to the ending doom.So, till the judgment that yourself arise,You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
116 Fifty-seventh Sonnet
BEING your slave, what should I do but tendUpon the hours and times of your desire?I have no precious time at all to spendNor services to do, till you require:Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hourWhilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,Nor think the bitterness of absence sourWhen you have bid your servant once adieu:Nor dare I question with my jealous thoughtWhere you may be, or your affairs suppose,But like a sad slave, stay and think of noughtSave, where you are, how happy you make those.So true a fool is love, that in your will,Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.
117 Sixtieth Sonnet
LIKE as the waves make towards the pebbled shoreSo do our minutes hasten to their end;Each changing place with that which goes before,In sequent toil all forwards do contend.Nativity once in the main of light,Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,Crooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight,And Time, that gave, doth now his gift confound.Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow;Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:And yet, to times in hope, my verse shall standPraising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
118 Sixty-fourth Sonnet
WHEN I have seen by Time’s fell hand defacedThe 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 gainAdvantage 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 chooseBut weep to have that which it fears to lose.
119 Sixty-fifth Sonnet
SINCE brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,But sad mortality o’ersways their power,How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,Whose action is no stronger than a flower?O how shall summer’s honey breath hold outAgainst the wreckful siege of battering days,When rocks impregnable are not so stoutNor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?O fearful meditation! where, alack!Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?O none, unless this miracle have might,That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
120 Sixty-sixth Sonnet
TIRED with all these, for restful death I cry,—As, to behold desert a beggar born,And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,And purest faith unhappily forsworn,And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,And strength by limping sway disabled,And art made tongue-tied by authority,And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,And captive Good attending captain Ill:Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,Save that, to die, I leave my Love alone.
121 Seventy-first Sonnet
No longer mourn for me when I am deadThan you shall hear the surly sullen bellGive warning to the world, that I am fledFrom this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell;Nay, if you read this line, remember notThe hand that writ it; for I love you so,That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgotIf thinking on me then should make you woe.O, if, I say, you look upon this verseWhen 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.
122 Seventy-third Sonnet
THAT time of year thou may’st in me beholdWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hangUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang:In me thou see’st the twilight of such dayAs after sunset fadeth in the west,Which by and by black night doth take away,Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest:In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,That on the ashes of his youth doth lieAs the deathbed whereon it must expire,Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by:This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
123 Eighty-seventh Sonnet
FAREWELL! thou art too dear for my possessing,And like enough thou know’st thy estimate:The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;My bonds in thee are all determinate.For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?And for that riches where is my deserving?The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,And so my patent back again is swerving.Thyself thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing,Or me, to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking;So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,Comes home again, on better judgment making.Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter;In sleep, a king; but waking, no such matter.
The reading ends with the Eighty-seventh Sonnet on page 276; the Ninetieth Sonnet, which begins lower on that page and runs on past the assigned pages, is left out.
Volume 40, pages 270–276 · See the scanned page on archive.org
This is the reading for May 20 in Fifteen Minutes a Day: The Reading Guide (1930 edition), page 5. There the assignment reads “Vol. 40, pp. 270–276.” Read it in the guide.