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To His Coy Mistress  Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

Launch Audio in a New Window And yonder all before us lie
BY ANDREW MARVELL Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Had we but world enough and time, Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
This coyness, lady, were no crime. My echoing song; then worms shall try
We would sit down, and think which way That long-preserved virginity,
To walk, and pass our long love’s day. And your quaint honour turn to dust,
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side And into ashes all my lust;
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide The grave’s a fine and private place,
Of Humber would complain. I would But none, I think, do there embrace.
Love you ten years before the flood,        Now therefore, while the youthful hue
And you should, if you please, refuse Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
Till the conversion of the Jews. And while thy willing soul transpires
My vegetable love should grow At every pore with instant fires,
Vaster than empires and more slow; Now let us sport us while we may,
An hundred years should go to praise And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Rather at once our time devour
Two hundred to adore each breast, Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
But thirty thousand to the rest; Let us roll all our strength and all
An age at least to every part, Our sweetness up into one ball,
And the last age should show your heart. And tear our pleasures with rough strife
For, lady, you deserve this state, Through the iron gates of life:
Nor would I love at lower rate. Thus, though we cannot make our sun
       But at my back I always hear Stand still, yet we will make him run.
The Flea Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
BY JOHN DONNE Where we almost, nay more than married
are.
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
This flea is you and I, and this
How little that which thou deniest me is;
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
Though use make you apt to kill me,
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
And pampered swells with one blood
made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do. Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?
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Wherein could this flea guilty be, ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:
Except in that drop which it sucked from Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to
thee? me,
Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou Will waste, as this flea’s death took life
from thee.
Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;
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Sonnet 116
By William Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
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Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
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 ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
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Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
   As any she belied with false compare.
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Romeo and Juliet

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
5 Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid since she is envious.
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off!
10 It is my lady. Oh, it is my love.
Oh, that she knew she were!
She speaks, yet she says nothing. What of that?
Her eye discourses. I will answer it.—
I am too bold. 'Tis not to me she speaks.
15 Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars
20 As daylight doth a lamp. Her eye in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
See how she leans her cheek upon her hand.
Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand
25 That I might touch that cheek!
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JULIET
O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.
[…]
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.
ROMEO
I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
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The Merchant of Venice

Shylock
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means,
warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer
as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?
Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his
sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.
The villainy you teach me, I will execute,
and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Theseus
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt;
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!
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As You Like It

Jaques
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose well saved a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again towards childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.