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Sonnet 68: Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn

William Shakespeare·1564–1616
Lines:14Movement:English Renaissance
Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,Before these bastard signs of fair were born,Or durst inhabit on a living brow;Before the golden tresses of the dead,The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,To live a second life on second head;Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay:In him those holy antique hours are seen,Without all ornament, itself and true,Making no summer of another's green,Robbing no old to dress his beauty new; And him as for a map doth Nature store, To show false Art what beauty was of yore.