Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend

Upon thy self thy beauty’s legacy?

Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,

And being frank she lends to those are free:

Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse

The bounteous largess given thee to give?

Profitless usurer, why dost thou use

So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?

For having traffic with thy self alone,

Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive:

Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,

What acceptable audit canst thou leave?

Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,

Which, used, lives th’ executor to be

William Shakespeare

Presenters

Mark Chatterley

Thierry Heles

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 rememb’red not to be,

Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

William Shakespeare

Mark Chatterley

Thierry Heles

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 tottered 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 deserved 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.

William Shakespeare

Mark Chatterley

Thierry Heles

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

William Shakespeare

Presenters

Mark Chatterley

Thierry Heles

Mark Chatterley and Thierry Heles take you through each of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets one by one in this amazing podcast series. Explore these amazing poems as they do and improve your knowledge of one of the greatest writers in the history of the world.