Your love and pity doth the impression fill,
Which vulgar scandal stamp’d upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o’er-green my bad, my good allow? 
You are my all-the-world, and I must strive
To know my shames and praises from your tongue;
None else to me, nor I to none alive,
That my steel’d sense or changes right or wrong. 
In so profound abysm I throw all care
Of others’ voices, that my adder’s sense
To critic and to flatterer stopped are. 
Mark how with my neglect I do dispense: 
  You are so strongly in my purpose bred,
  That all the world besides methinks are dead.

CXIII

Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind;
And that which governs me to go about
Doth part his function and is partly blind,
Seems seeing, but effectually is out;
For it no form delivers to the heart
Of bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch: 
Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,
Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch;
For if it see the rud’st or gentlest sight,
The most sweet favour or deformed’st creature,
The mountain or the sea, the day or night: 
The crow, or dove, it shapes them to your feature. 
  Incapable of more, replete with you,
  My most true mind thus maketh mine untrue.

CXIV

Or whether doth my mind, being crown’d with you,
Drink up the monarch’s plague, this flattery? 
Or whether shall I say, mine eye saith true,
And that your love taught it this alchemy,
To make of monsters and things indigest
Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble,
Creating every bad a perfect best,
As fast as objects to his beams assemble? 
O! ’tis the first, ’tis flattery in my seeing,
And my great mind most kingly drinks it up: 
Mine eye well knows what with his gust is ’greeing,
And to his palate doth prepare the cup: 
  If it be poison’d, ’tis the lesser sin
  That mine eye loves it and doth first begin.

CXV

Those lines that I before have writ do lie,
Even those that said I could not love you dearer: 
Yet then my judgment knew no reason why
My most full flame should afterwards burn clearer. 
But reckoning Time, whose million’d accidents
Creep in ’twixt vows, and change decrees of kings,
Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp’st intents,
Divert strong minds to the course of altering things;
Alas! why fearing of Time’s tyranny,
Might I not then say, ‘Now I love you best,’
When I was certain o’er incertainty,
Crowning the present, doubting of the rest? 
  Love is a babe, then might I not say so,
  To give full growth to that which still doth grow?

CXVI