Sonnet 83

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.

I never thought you needed a poet

To raise you on a pedestal.

I saw, or thought I saw it,

More in you than I could tell.

And so I’ve slept and not reported,

So you might show with your bare life

How much of life art has shorted,

How much of art is in your life.

You took my silence for an accident,

A wrong or an inadequacy.

But I maim nothing, being silent.

More perverse is poetry.

There’s more of life in one of your hands

Than in any song, or any dance.