CXII

Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamp’d upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o’er-green my bad, my good allow?
You are my all the world, and I must strive
To know my shames and praises from your tongue;
None else to me, nor I to none alive,
That my steel’d sense or changes right or wrong.
In so profound abysm I throw all care
Of others’ voices, that my adder’s sense
To critic and to flatterer stopped are.
Mark how with my neglect I do dispense:
You are so strongly in my purpose bred
That all the world besides methinks are dead.

Where this text comes from

First published in Shake-speares Sonnets (1609). First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established. [1] [2]

Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.

Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/william-shakespeare_poetry, sonnets.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).

Earlier sources (2)

This poem as JSON or plain text. Line anchors #L1#L14.

Cite this poem

William Shakespeare (1564–1616). “CXII.” First published in Shake-speares Sonnets (1609). Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/william-shakespeare/cxii/. Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.

More by William Shakespeare