Celebrate National Poetry Month — here is Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 64.”

This might have been the first poem I ever committed to memory, back in my high school days.  (It was either this or Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.”)  It escapes me now, as has the reason it was once so important.

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate 
That Time will come and take my love away. 
   This thought is as a death which cannot choose
   But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/64