18 and 81

Considering the mirror reflection of 18 and 81, I was reminded of those two sonnets which refer, amongst other things, to death and breath, and the eternal and immortal power of poetry:

 

SONNET 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;

  So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

SONNET 81

Or I shall live your epitaph to make,

Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;

From hence your memory death cannot take,

Although in me each part will be forgotten.

Your name from hence immortal life shall have,

Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:

The earth can yield me but a common grave,

When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,

Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read,

And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,

When all the breathers of this world are dead;

   You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen)

   Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.

And who is writing these life-giving sonnets? I think the pen belongs to Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke.