Sonnet · Love
Sonnet 63: Against my love shall be as I am now
1Against my love shall be as I am now,
2With Time's injurious hand crush'd and o'erworn;
3When hours have drain'd his blood and fill'd his brow
4With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
5Hath travell'd on to age's steepy night;
6And all those beauties whereof now he's king
7Are vanishing, or vanished out of sight,
8Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
9For such a time do I now fortify
10Against confounding age's cruel knife,
11That he shall never cut from memory
12My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life:
13 His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
14 And they shall live, and he in them still green.
Full-text availability follows the United States display decision recorded below; status can differ elsewhere.
“Sonnet 63: Against my love shall be as I am now” by William Shakespeare — quilloak.com/poems/sonnet-63
Quick facts
- Poem
- Sonnet 63: Against my love shall be as I am now
- Poet
- William Shakespeare
- Length
- 14 lines
- Form
- Sonnet
- Themes
- Love, Spring, Nature
Craft notes
How this poem works
Measured from the text on this page, not copied from a summary. Counts are approximate: syllables and rhymes come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which models General American English, so dialect, older pronunciation, and performance can all change what you hear.
- Shape
- 14 lines · one 14-line stanza
- Line length
- Mostly 10-syllable lines (pentameter length).
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Text, source & rights
A traceable edition
Full-text display is based on the committed source record and a United States term-expiry review.
- Author record
- William Shakespeare1564–1616
- Source record
- PoetryDBSonnet 63: Against my love shall be as I am now by william-shakespeare, PoetryDB transcription
- Display decision
- Full text · United States · reviewed 2026-07-18
- Publication record
- Not recorded in the imported source
- Text fingerprint
- SHA-256 89ab1c46d39e745d…
- Editorial handling
- Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.