You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever.

Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. There are days when I can hear my bones straining under the weight of despair, this madness that erupts like an earthquake when I feel you lost. This heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until there are none. It is a mortal danger, perhaps not to life in a strict sense but mortal still, for I know very well my soul would harden and never be the same if I lose you.

But think not for a minute this is despair's babble, even in my seldom moments of calm and lucidness and peace I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than ever mine or someone else's. I want to deserve you, for I have to love you E, I have to love you. It matters not this wound that burns like two, it matters not that I search for you and I do not find you, even as the nights go by and I do not have you.

If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee;
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But, ah, thought kills me that I am not thought,
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that, so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend time’s leisure with my moan,
    Receiving nought by elements so slow,
    But heavy tears, badges of either’s woe.

Come away, come away, death,
  And in sad cypres let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath;
  I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
          O prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
          Did share it.

Not a flower, not a flower sweet,
  On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
  My poor corse, where my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
          Lay me, O, where
Sad true lover never find my grave
          To weep there!

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as mad men’s are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed.
    For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
    Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
    So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
    You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.