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Have you seen that portrait Gaugin did of me painting sunflowers?
it was really I, but it\'s I gone mad.
Vincent Van Gogh

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.

 	--William Shakespeare

CXLIX



Canst thou, O cruel! say I love thee not,

When I against myself with thee partake?

Do I not think on thee, when I forgot

Am of my self, all tyrant, for thy sake?

Who hateth thee that I do call my friend,

On whom frown\'st thou that I do fawn upon,

Nay, if thou lour\'st on me, do I not spend

Revenge upon myself with present moan?

What merit do I in my self respect,

That is so proud thy service to despise,

When all my best doth worship thy defect,

Commanded by the motion of thine eyes?

  But, love, hate on, for now I know thy mind,;

  Those that can see thou lov\'st, and I am blind.

 	--William Shakespeare

LXXXIII



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

That 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.

 	--William Shakespeare