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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare cover

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

Chapter 1097: V
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About This Book

This collection gathers dramatic works and lyrical poems spanning comedies, tragedies, histories, and a sonnet sequence, presenting plays in verse and prose alongside narrative poems. The pieces examine human experience through recurring themes of love, ambition, jealousy, power, fate, and the tension between appearance and reality, moving between comic confusion and tragic collapse. Language and theatrical craft are central, employing vivid imagery, rhetorical invention, puns, and varied poetic forms to probe identity, political conflict, and moral choice across intimate moments and public spectacle.

V

If love make me forsworn, how shall I swear to love?
O never faith could hold, if not to beauty vowed.
Though to myself forsworn, to thee I’ll constant prove;
Those thoughts, to me like oaks, to thee like osiers bowed.
Study his bias leaves, and makes his book thine eyes,
Where all those pleasures live that art can comprehend.
If knowledge be the mark, to know thee shall suffice;
Well learned is that tongue that well can thee commend,
All ignorant that soul that sees thee without wonder;
Which is to me some praise, that I thy parts admire.
Thine eye Jove’s lightning seems, thy voice his dreadful thunder,
Which, not to anger bent, is music and sweet fire.
    Celestial as thou art, O do not love that wrong,
    To sing heaven’s praise with such an earthly tongue.