Shakespeare's Sonnets Navigator Summary of Sonnet 68 in the Table of Contents Notes for Sonnet 68

Shakespeare's Sonnet 68


  1    Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
  2    When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
  3    Before these bastard signs of fair were born,
  4    Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
  5    Before the golden tresses of the dead,
  6    The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
  7    To live a second life on second head;
  8    Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay:
  9    In him those holy antique hours are seen,
 10    Without all ornament, itself and true,
 11    Making no summer of another's green,
 12    Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;
 13      And him as for a map doth Nature store,
 14      To show false Art what beauty was of yore.

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