| William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Elizabethan Verse. 1907. | | | | Time and Love | | By William Shakespeare (1564–1616) |
| | | 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 | 5 |
| 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,— | 10 |
| 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. | | | | |
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