I never saw that you did painting need
And therefore to your fair no painting set;
I found, or thought I found, you did exceed
The barren tender of a poet’s debt;
And therefore have I slept in your report,
That you yourself being extant well might show
How far a modern quill doth come too short,
Speaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow.
This silence for my sin you did impute,
Which shall be most my glory, being dumb;
For I impair not beauty being mute,
When others would give life and bring a tomb.
There lives more life in one of your fair eyes
Than both your poets can in praise devise.
This sonnet is closely linked to the preceding one, especially by the opening two lines, which pick up the idea of painting from the closing couplet of 82. In addition there is the repeated idea of the limits of possible praise being exceeded by the youth’s natural merits, and the ‘devising’ of rhetorical artifices in the hope of praising him.
Sonnet LXXXIII
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