The Sonnets LXVIII - Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn
By William Shakespeare
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 beautys dead fleece made another gay:
In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself and true,
Making no summer of anothers 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.