Valentine’s Day with Shakespeare

• I
• From fairest creatures we desire increase,
• That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
• But as the riper should by time decease,
• His tender heir might bear his memory:
• But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
• Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
• Making a famine where abundance lies,
• Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
• Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
• And only herald to the gaudy spring,
• Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
• And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding:
•    Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
•    To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

• II
• When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
• And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
• Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,
• Will be a totter’d weed of small worth held: 
• Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
• Where all the treasure of thy lusty days; 
• To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
• Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
• How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,
• If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
• Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’
• Proving his beauty by succession thine!
•    This were to be new made when thou art old,
•    And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

• III
• Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
• Now is the time that face should form another;
• Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
• Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
• For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
• Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
• Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
• Of his self-love, to stop posterity? 
• Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee
• Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
• So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
• Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
•    But if thou live, remembered not to be,
•    Die single and thine image dies with thee.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616), who needs no introduction on a poetry page, was considered the greatest English poet — and perhaps one of the greatest poets of any language — to put pen to paper. The general reading public usually demonstrates an increased interest in his work, especially his sonnets on love, around Valentine’s Day