Sonnet 33

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Sonnet 33 in the 1609 Quarto
Q1 Q2 Q3 C Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rack on his celestial face, And from the forlorn world his visage hide, Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace: Even so my sun one early morn did shine With all-triumphant splendor on my brow; But, out, alack! he was but one hour mine, The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now. Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth; Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth. 4 8 12 14 —William Shakespeare

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Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendor on my brow;
But, out, alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

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Shakespeare's Sonnet 33 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. This sonnet is the first of what are sometimes called the estrangement sonnets, numbers 33–36: poems concerned with the speaker's response to an unspecified "sensual fault" mentioned in (35) committed by his beloved.

Nicolaus Delius notes thematic and stylistic parallels to the last scene of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. George Steevens and Edward Dowden were among the first to group the so-called "estrangement sonnets" and to note the parallels to other groups (such as sonnets 40, 41, and 42) with similar themes.

This sonnet is viewed by T. R. Price as representing "the highest lyrical expression that English poetry has achieved". This is displayed in the power of using the beauty of nature as the symbol of human emotion.Samuel Taylor Coleridge instances the opening of this sonnet as characteristic of Shakespeare's imaginative style, by which he "gives a dignity and a passion to the objects which he presents. Unaided by any previous excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power." According to Gerrold Hammond, the single sentence octave, the first two quatrains, presents the reader with the strong poetic nature by using adjective plus noun structures on every line. The order and abundance makes the reader aware of the rhetoric.