Sonnet 9

Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye That thou consum’st thyself in single life? Ah! If thou issueless shalt hap to die, The world will wail thee like a makeless wife, The world will be thy widow and still weep, That thou no form of thee hast left behind, When every private widow well may keep, By children’s eyes, her husband’s shape in mind. Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it, But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end, And kept unus’d, the user so destroys it:     No love toward others in that bosom sits     That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.