Classic Poem

Yet that their happy voyage might not be
Without time's short'ner, heaven-taught melody
(Music that lent feet to the stable woods,
And in their currents turn'd the mighty floods:
Sorrow's sweet nurse, yet keeping joy alive:
Sad discontent's most welcome corrosive:
The soul of Art, best lov'd when Love is by:
The kind inspirer of sweet Poesy,
Lest thou shouldst wanting be, when swans would fain
Have sung one song, and never sung again,)
The gentle shepherd hasting to the shore
Began this lay, and tim'd it with his oar:

Never more let holy Dec
O'er other rivers brave,
Or boast how (in his jollity)
Kings row'd upon his wave;
But silent be, and ever know
That Neptune for my fare would row.

Those were captives. If he say
That now I am no other,
Yet she that bears my prison's key
Is fairer than Love's mother.
A god took me, those, one less high:
They wore their bonds, so do not I.

Swell then, gently swell, ye floods,
As proud of what ye bear,
And nymphs, that in low coral woods
String pearls upon your hair,
Ascend: and tell if ere this day
A fairer prize was seen at sea.

See, the salmons leap and bound.
To please us as we pass;
Each mermaid on the rocks around,
Lets fall her brittle glass,
As they their beauties did despise,
And lov'd no mirror but your eyes.

Blow, but gently blow, fair wind,
From the forsaken shore,
And be as to the Halcyon kind,
Till we have ferried o'er:
So may'st thou still have leave to blow,
And fan the way where she shall go.

Floods, and nymphs, and winds, and all
That see us both together,
Into a disputation fall,
And then resolve me whether
The greatest kindness each can show
Will quit our trust of you or no.

Thus as a merry milkmaid, neat and fine,
Returning late from milking of her kine,
Shortens the dew'd way which she treads along
With some self-pleasing-since-new-gotten song,
The shepherd did their passage well beguile.
And now the horned flood bore to our Isle
His head more high than he had us'd to do,
Except by Cynthia's newness forced to.
Not January's snow dissolv'd in floods
Makes Tamar more intrude on Blanchden Woods,
Nor the concourse of waters where they fleet
After a long rain, and in Severn meet,
Rais'th her enraged head to root fair plants,
Or more affright her nigh inhabitants,
(When they behold the waters ruefully,
And save the waters nothing else can see,)
Than Neptune's subject now, more than of yore:
As loath to set his burden soon on shore.
O Neptune! hadst thou kept them still with thee,
Though both were lost to us and such as we,
And with those beauteous birds which on thy breast
Get and bring up, afforded them a rest,
Delos, that long time wand'ring piece of earth,
Had not been fam'd more for Diana's birth,
Than those few planks that bore them on the seas,
By the blest issue of two such as these.
But they were landed: so are not our woes,
Nor ever shall, whilst from an eye there flows
One drop of moisture; to these present times
We will relate, and some sad shepherd's rhymes
To after ages may their fates make known,
And in their depth of sorrow drown his own.
So our relation and his mournful verse
Of tears shall force such tribute to their hearse,
That not a private grief shall ever thrive
But in that deluge fall, yet this survive.
Two furlongs from the shore they had not gone,
When from a low-cast valley (having on
Each hand a woody hill, whose boughs unlopp'd
Have not alone at all time sadly dropp'd,
And turn'd their storms on her dejected breast,
But when the fire of heaven is ready prest
To warm and further what it should bring forth,
For lowly dales mate mountains in their worth,
The trees (as screenlike greatness) shade his ray,
As it should shine on none but such as they)—
Came, and full sadly came, a hapless wretch,
Whose walks and pastures once were known to stretch
From east to west so far that no dike ran
For noted bounds, but where the ocean
His wrathful billows thrust, and grew as great
In shoals of fish as were the other's neat:
Who now dejected and depriv'd of all,
Longs, and hath done so long, for funeral.