WHEREIN HE PURSUES SOLITUDE, BUT LOVE SHADOWS HIM EVERYWHITHER

Alone, thought-sick, I pace where none has been,
Roaming the desert with dull steps and slow,
And still glance warily about to know
If the herd follows, if the world has seen:
How else the hoofprint of the Philistine
Escape, but in some cave with grief to go!
I look distraught and haggard: I must show
No one how keen Love's tooth is, O how keen!
Meseems the very mountains and the shores,
Rivers and woods must guess the secret I
So seek to hide from men by desert doors —

TO STRAMAZZO OF PERUGIA, WHO INVITED HIM TO WRITE VERSES

If the proud branch, whose honoured leaf defies
The fury of Heaven when Jove thunders loud,
Had not prevented me from being proud
By keeping me uncrowned, my ardent eyes
Should bend with you in your idolatries,
To which our craven age has never bowed;
Alas, that laurelled injury has cowed
My spirit and forced me from the olive trees!
For Ethiopian earth beneath its sun
Never with such heat hissed, as burns my drouth
At loss of what I set my soul upon.

WHEREIN HE CHIDES LOVE THAT COULD WOUND HIM ON A HOLY DAY (GOOD FRIDAY)

It was the morning of that blessed day
Whereon the Sun in pity veiled his glare
For the Lord's agony, that, unaware,
I fell a captive, Lady, to the sway
Of your swift eyes: that seemed no time to stay
The strokes of Love: I stepped into the snare
Secure, with no suspicion: then and there
I found my cue in man's most tragic play.
Love caught me naked to his shaft, his sheaf,
The entrance for his ambush and surprise
Against the heart wide open through the eyes,

THE NATURAL DEATH OF LOVE

R ICHARD one month had with his brother been,
And had his guests, his friends, his favourites seen;
Had heard the rector, who with decent force,
But not of action, aided his discourse:
" A moral teacher! " some, contemptuous, cried;
He smiled, but nothing of the fact denied,
Nor, save by his fair life, to charge so strong replied
Still, though he bade them not on aught rely,
That was their own, but all their worth deny,
They call'd his pure advice his cold morality;

X

The long love that in my thought doth harbour
And in mine heart doth keep his residence
Into my face presseth with bold pretence
And therein campeth, spreading his banner.
She that me learneth to love and suffer
And will that my trust and lust's negligence
Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence,
With his hardiness taketh displeasure.
Wherewithal unto the heart's forest he fleeth,
Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry,
And there him hideth and not appeareth.
What may I do when my master feareth,

If amorous faith, a heart of guileless ways,
Soft languors, courteously controlled desire,
And virtuous will, kindled with noble fire,
And lengthened wanderings in a lightless maze;
If thoughts, which evermore the brow displays,
Or words that faint and brokenly suspire,
Still checked with fear and shame; if hues no higher
Than the pale violet hath, or love displays;
If holding some one than one's self more dear,
If sorrowing and sighing evermore,
If chewing grief, and rage, and many a cross,
If burning far away, and freezing near,

Set me wheras the sonne dothe perche the grene,
Or whear his beames may not dissolve the Ise,
In temprat heat wheare he is felt and sene;
With prowde people, in presence sad and wyse;
Set me in base, or yet in highe degree,
In the long night or in the shortyst day,
In clere weather or whear mysts thikest be,
In lusty yowthe, or when my heares be grey;
Set me in earthe, in heaven, or yet in hell,
In hill, in dale, or in the fowming floode;
Thrawle, or at large, alive whersoo I dwell,
Sike, or in healthe, in yll fame or in good:

The lonely fox roams far abroad,
On secret rapine bent, and midnight fraud;
Now haunts the cliff, now traverses the lawn,
And flies the hated neighbourhood of man:
While the kind spaniel, or the faithful hound,
Likest that fox in shape and species found,
Refuses through these cliffs and lawns to roam,
Pursues the noted path, and covets home;
Does with kind joy domestic faces meet,
Take what the glutted child denies to eat,
And, dying, licks his long-loved master's feet.

The time I went to see my Sister
Whom I loved unendurably,
The winter-night's
River-wind was so cold that
The sanderlings were crying.

1

When you shall see me in the toils of Time,
My lauded beauties carried off from me,
My eyes no longer stars as in their prime,
My name forgot of maiden fair and free;

When, in your being, heart concedes to mind,
And judgement, though you scarce its process know,
Recalls the excellencies I once enshrined,
And you are irked that they have withered so:

Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame,