William Shakespeare (1564-1616). To Me, Fair Friend, You Never Can Be Old. William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. 1907. The Book of Elizabethan Verse

William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Elizabethan Verse. 1907.

To Me, Fair Friend, You Never Can Be Old

By William Shakespeare (1564–1616)


TO 1 me, fair friend, you never can be old;
For as you were when first your eye I eyed, 2
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride; 3
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d	5
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, 4 and no pace perceived;	10
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived.
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred:
Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.

Note 1. Sonnet civ., in Shake-speare’s Sonnettes, 1609. [back]

Note 2. Eyed: Cf. “I ear’d her language,” in The Two Noble Kinsmen. [back]

Note 3. Three summers’ pride: Cf. Romeo and Juliet, act i. sc. 2: “Let two more summers wither in their pride.” [back]

Note 4. Steal from his figure: creeps from his figure as the dial. So in Sonnet lxxvii., “thy dial’s shady stealth.” [back]