And though fowl now be scarce, yet there are clerks,
The sky not falling, think we may have larks.
I'll tell you of more, and lie, so you will come:
Of partridge, pheasant, woodcock, of which some
May yet be there; and god-wit if we can;
Knat, rail, and ruff too. Howsoe'er, my man 20
Shall read a piece of Virgil, Tacitus,
Livy, or of some better book to us,
Of which we'll speak our minds, amidst our meat;
And I'll profess no verses to repeat.
To this if aught appear, which I not know of,
That will the pastry, not my paper, show of.
Digestive cheese, and fruit there sure will be;
But that which most doth take my muse and me
Is a pure cup of rich Canary wine,
Which is the Mermaid's now, but shall be mine:
Of which had Horace or Anacreon tasted,
Their lives, as do their lines, till now had lasted.
Tobacco, nectar, or the Thespian spring,
Are all but Luther's beer to this I sing.
Of this we will sup free, but moderately,
And we will have no Pooly, or Parrot by;
Nor shall our cups make any guilty men,
But at our parting we will be as when
We innocently met. No simple word,
That shall be uttered at our mirthful board,
Shall make us sad next morning, or affright
The liberty that we'll enjoy to-night.
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot; Teach me to hear mermaids singing, Or to keep off envy's stinging, And find
Serves to advance an honest mind.
If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible go see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights
Till Age snow white hairs on thee; Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me All strange wonders that befell thee,
Lives a woman true and fair.
If thou find'st one, let me know;
Such a pilgrimage were sweet.
Yet do not; I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet. Though she were true when you met her, And last till you write your letter,
False, ere I come, to two or three.
I can love both fair and brown;
Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays;
Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays;
Her whom the country form'd, and whom the town;
Her who believes, and her who tries;
Her who still weeps with spongy eyes,
And her who is dry cork and never cries.
I can love her, and her, and you, and you;
I can love any, so she be not true.
Will no other vice content you?
Will it not serve your turn to do as did your mothers?
Or have you all old vices spent and now would find out others?
Or doth a fear that men are true torment you? O we are not, be not you so;
Let me and do you twenty know;
Call's what you will, we are made such by love;
Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find th' eagle and the dove.
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it;
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tomb or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns all shall approve
Us canonized for love;
I long to talk with some old lover's ghost
Who died before the god of love was born.
I cannot think that he who then loved most
Sunk so low as to love one which did scorn.
But since this god produced a destiny,
And that vice-nature, custom, lets it be,
I must love her that loves not me.
Sure, they which made him god, meant not so much,
Nor he in his young godhead practiced it. But when an even flame two hearts did touch, His office was indulgently to fit Actives to passives. Correspondency Only his subject was; it cannot be Love till I love her who loves me.
But every modern god will not extend
His vast prerogative as far as Jove.
To rage, to lust, to write to, to commend,
All is the purlieu of the god of love.
O! were we waken'd by this tyranny
To ungod this child again, it could not be
I should love her who loves not me.
For my first twenty years, since yesterday,
I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away;
For forty more I fed on favours past,
And forty on hopes that thou wouldst they might last;
Tears drown'd one hundred, and sighs blew out two;
A thousand I did neither think nor do,
Or not divide, all being one thought of you;
Or in a thousand more, forgot that too.
Yet call not this long life; but think that I
Am, by being dead, immortal; can ghosts die?
If poisonous minerals, and if that tree
Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damn'd, alas! why should I be?
Why should intent or reason, born in me,
Make sins, else equal, in me more heinous?
And, mercy being easy and glorious
To God, in His stern wrath why threatens He? 8
But who am I, that dare dispute with Thee?
O God, O! of Thine only worthy blood
And my tears make a heavenly Lethean flood,
And drown in it my sin's black memory.
That Thou remember them, some claim as debt;
I think it mercy if Thou wilt forget.
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill
From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must
And soonest our best men with thee do go-
Rest of their bones and souls' delivery!
Thou'rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell; And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die.!
Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sins their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.
One-half being made, thy modesty was such,
That thou on th' other half wouldst never touch.
When wilt thou be at full, great lunatic?
Not till thou exceed the world? Canst thou be like
A prosperous nose-born wen, which sometimes grows
To be far greater than the mother-nose?
Go then, and as to thee, when thou didst go,
Münster did towns and Gesner authors show,
Mount now to Gallo-Belgicus; appear
As deep a statesman as a gazeteer.
Homely and familiarly, when thou comest back,
Talk of Will Conqueror, and Prester Jack.
Go, bashful man, lest here thou blush to look
Upon the progress of thy glorious book.
BOOK I, SATIRE III
With some pot-fury, ravish'd from their wit,
They sit and muse on some no-vulgar writ:
As frozen dunghills in a winter's morn,
That void of vapours seemèd all beforn,
Soon as the sun sends out his piercing beams,
Exhale out filthy smoke and stinking steams;
So doth the base, and the fore-barren brain,
Soon as the raging wine begins to reign.
One higher pitch'd doth set his soaring thought
On crowned kings, that fortune hath low brought;
Or some upreared, high-aspiring swain,
As it might be the Turkish Tamberlain:
Then weeneth he his base drink-drowned spright,
Rapt to the threefold loft of heaven hight,
When he conceives upon his feigned stage
The stalking steps of his great personage,
Graced with huff-cap terms and thund'ring
threats,
That his poor hearers' hair quite upright sets.
Such soon as some brave-minded hungry youth
Sees fitly frame to his wide-strained mouth,
He vaunts his voice upon an hired stage,
With high-set steps and princely carriage;
Now swooping in side robes of royalty,
That erst did scrub in lousy brokery.
There if he can with terms Italianate,
Big-sounding sentences and words of state,
Fair patch me up his pure iambic verse,
He ravishes the gazing scaffolders.
Then certes was the famous Corduban
Never but half so high tragedian.
A goodly grace to sober tragic muse,
When each base clown his clumsy fist doth bruise,
And show his teeth in double rotten row,
For laughter at his self-resembled show.
Meanwhile our poets in high parliament
Sit watching every word and gesturement,
Like curious censors of some doughty gear,
Whispering their verdict in their fellow's ear.
Woe to the word whose margent in their scroll
Is noted with a black condemning coal.
But if each period might the synod please,
Ho!- bring the ivy boughs, and bands of bays.
Now when they part and leave the naked stage,
'Gins the bare hearer, in a guilty rage,
To curse and ban, and blame his likerous eye,
That thus hath lavish'd his late halfpenny.
Shame that the Muses should be bought and
For every peasant's brass, on each scaffold.
FROM THE SCOURGE OF VILLAINY
In Lectores prorsus indignos
Fie, Satire, fie! shall each mechanic slave, Each dunghill peasant, free perusal have
Of thy well-labour'd lines? — each satin suit,
Each quaint fashion-monger, whose sole repute
Rests in his trim gay clothes, lie slavering,
Tainting thy lines with his lewd censuring?
Shall each odd puisne of the lawyer's inn,
Each barmy-froth, that last day did begin
To read his little, or his ne'er a whit,
Or shall some greater ancient, of less wit
That never turn'd but brown tobacco leaves,
Whose senses some damn'd occupant bereaves,
Lie gnawing on thy vacant time's expense,
Tearing thy rhymes, quite altering the sense?
Or shall perfum'd Castilio censure thee,
Shall he o'erview thy sharp-fang'd poesy
Who ne'er read further than his mistress lips,
Ne'er practised ought but some spruce cap'ring
skips,
Ne'er in his life did other language use,
But "Sweet lady, fair mistress, kind heart, dear cuz"
Shall this phantasma, this Coloss peruse,
And blast, with stinking breath, my budding muse?
Fie! wilt thou make thy wit a courtezan
For every broken handcraft's artisan?
Shall brainless cittern-heads, each jobbernoul,
Pocket the very genius of thy soul?
Ay, Phylo, ay, I'll keep an open hall, A common and a sumptuous festival. Welcome all eyes, all ears, all tongues to me! Gnaw peasants on my scraps of poesy! Castilios, Cyprians, court-boys, Spanish blocks, Ribanded ears, Granado netherstocks, Fiddlers, scriveners, pedlars, tinkering knaves, Base blue-coats, tapsters, broad-cloth-minded
Let me alone, the madams call for thee,
Longing to laugh at thy wit's poverty.
Sirra livery cloak, you lazy slipper-slave,
Thou fawning drudge, what, wouldst thou satires
have?
50
Base mind, away, thy master calls, be gone.
Sweet Gnato, let my poesy alone;
Go buy some ballad of the Fairy King,
And of the beggar wench some roguy thing,
Which thou mayst chant unto the chamber-
maid
To some vile tune, when that thy master's laid.
But will you needs stay? am I forced to bear
The blasting breath of each lewd censurer?
Must naught but clothes, and images of men,
But spriteless trunks, be judges of thy pen?
Nay then, come all! I prostitute my muse,
For all the swarms of idiots to abuse.
Read all, view all; even with my full consent,
So you will know that which I never meant;
So you will ne'er conceive, and yet dispraise
That which you ne'er conceived, and laughter
raise,
Where I but strive in honest seriousness
To scourge some soul-polluting beastliness.
So you will rail, and find huge errors lurk
In every corner of my cynic work.
Proface! read on, for your extrem'st dislikes
Will add a pinion to my praise's flights.
O how I bristle up my plumes of pride,
O how I think my satire's dignifi'd,
When I once hear some quaint Castilio,
Some supple-mouth'd slave, some lewd Tubrio,
Some spruce pedant, or some span-new-come
fry
Of inns-o'court, striving to vilify
My dark reproofs! Then do but rail at me,
No greater honour craves my poesy.
GEORGE SANDYS (1578-1644)
A PARAPHRASE UPON THE PSALMS OF DAVID
In my prosperity I said,
My feet shall ever fix'd abide;
I, by Thy favour fortifi'd,
Am like a steadfast mountain made.
But when Thou hid'st Thy cheerful face,
How infinite my troubles grew;
My cries then with my grief renew,
Which thus implor'd Thy saving grace.
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