Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye by William Shakespeare
As my file of poems is getting sparse, I turned to my Riverside Shakespeare for inspiration. I found a nice depressing sonnet…
Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye
By William Shakespeare
Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye
That thou consum’st thyself in single life?
Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die,
The world will wail thee, like a makeless wife;
The world will be thy widow, and still weep
That thou no form of thee hast left behind,
When every private widow well may keep,
By children’s eyes, her husband’s shape in mind.
Look, what an unthrift in the world doth spend
Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;
But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,
And kept unused, the user so destroys it.
No love toward others in that bosom sits
That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.
