Exempli Gratia: Classic Poetry

[JBI]

Milton, Paradise Lost first Paragraph

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
5Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
10Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
15Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first
20Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss,
And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That, to the height of this great argument,
25I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.

That's 2 sentences - talk about relative clauses.

[JBI]

From Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman
Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers,--
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,
Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?
Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October
Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o'er the ocean
Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pre.

Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,
Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman's devotion,
List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest;
List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.

Look at that metre - and he goes on like that for thousands and thousands of lines - that alone is impressive.

[JBI]

Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798 by William Wordsworth

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again;
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years.And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads than one
Who sought the thing he loved.For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all. I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, not any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense.For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes.Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service; rather say
With warmer love oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love.Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

[JBI]

To Autumn by John Keats

1
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
2
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
3
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

[Jozanny]

To Autumn by John Keats

1
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.[/COLOR]

What an extraordinary poet Keats was! You must be reading my mind JBI, as I have been thinking a lot about "To Autumn" in recent weeks. To me Keats says more about love and passion and mortality in this one poem than Roethke does in twenty with his obsession over ungainliness.

[quasimodo1]

SATVRA II

VLTRA Sauromatas fugere hinc libet et glacialem
Oceanum, quotiens aliquid de moribus audent
qui Curios simulant et Bacchanalia vivunt.
indocti primum, quamquam plena omnia gypso
5 Chrysippi invenias; nam perfectissimus horum,
si quis Aristotelen similem vel Pittacon emit
et iubet archetypos pluteum servare Cleanthas.
frontis nulla fides; quis enim non vicus abundat
tristibus obscaenis? castigas turpia, cum sis
10 inter Socraticos notissima fossa cinaedos?
hispida membra quidem et durae per bracchia saetae
promittunt atrocem animum, sed podice levi
caeduntur tumidae medico ridente mariscae.
rarus sermo illis et magna libido tacendi
15 atque supercilio brevior coma. verius ergo
et magis ingenue Peribomius; hunc ego fatis
inputo, qui vultu morbum incessuque fatetur.
horum simplicitas miserabilis, his furor ipse
dat veniam; sed peiores, qui talia verbis
20 Herculis invadunt et de virtute locuti
clunem agitant. "ego te ceventem, Sexte, verebor?"
infamis Varillus ait "quo deterior te?"
loripedem rectus derideat, Aethiopem albus;
quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE SATIRES OF JUVENAL

SATIRE II

MORALISTS WITHOUT MORALS

I would fain flee to Sarmatia and the frozen Sea when people who ape the Curii[1] and live like Bacchanals dare talk

about morals. In the first place, they are unlearned persons, though you may find their houses crammed with plaster

casts of Chrysippus;[2] for their greatest hero is the man who has brought a likeness of Aristotle or Pittacus,[3] or

bids his shelves preserve an original portrait of Cleanthes.[4] Men's faces are not to be trusted; does not every

street abound in gloomy-visaged debauchees? And do you rebuke foul practices, when you are yourself the most

notorious delving-ground among Socratic reprobates? A hairy body, and arms stiff with bristles, give promise of a

manly soul: but sleek are your buttocks when the grinning doctor cuts into the swollen piles. Men of your kidney talk

little; they glory in taciturnity, and cut their hair shorter than their eyebrows. Peribomius[5] himself is more open

and more honest; his face, his walk, betray his distemper, and I charge Destiny with his failings. Such men excite

your pity by their frankness; the very fury of their passions wins them pardon. Far worse are those who denounce evil

ways in the language of a Hercules; and after discoursing upon virtue, prepare to practise vice. "Am I to respect

you, Sextus," quoth the ill-famed Varillus, "when you do as I do? How am I worse than yourself?" Let the straight-

legged man laugh at the club-footed, the white man at the blackamoor: but who could endure the Gracchi railing at

sedition? Who will not confound heaven with earth, and sea with sky, if Verres denounce thieves, or Milo[6] cut-

throats? If Clodius condemn adulterers, or Catiline upbraid Cethegus;[7] or if Sulla's three disciples[8] inveigh

against proscriptions? Such a man was that adulterer[9] who, after lately defiling himself by a union of the tragic

style, revived the stern laws that were to be a terror to all men-ay, even to Mars and Venus-at the moment when Julia

was relieving her fertile womb and giving birth to abortions that displayed the similitude of her uncle. Is it not

then right and proper that the very worst of sinners should despise your pretended Scauri,[l0] and bite back when

bitten?
{from the inventor of satire}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/bo...l?8bu&emc=bua2 --RIMBAUD

The Double Life of a Rebel

By Edmund White

192 pp. Atlas & Company. $24
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-More aspects of Rimbaud are known than can be assimilated: his vastly various, influential and innovative poetry

itself; his expressive letters; his scornful and unhesitating permanent abandonment of poetry at the age of 20; the

anecdotes of his contemporaries showing him as a drunken, filthy, amoral homosexualteenager who becomes a reserved,

hard-working, responsible and respectable (if misanthropic and disgust-ridden) adult merchant and explorer. One would

have to be a genius oneself to grasp the full significance of Arthur Rimbaud, or at least have the ability to hold

many opposed ideas in one’s mind at the same time and still function fully. Numerous writers have sought to

demonstrate their qualifications along these lines by publishing studies of him.

[quasimodo1]

A Season in Hell
by Arthur Rimbaud
Translated by Bertrand Mathieu


A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing.

One night, I sat Beauty down on my lap.—And I found her galling.—And I roughed her up.

I armed myself against justice.

I ran away. O witches, O misery, O hatred, my treasure's been turned over to you!

I managed to make every trace of human hope vanish from my mind. I pounced on every joy like a ferocious animal eager to strangle it.

I called for executioners so that, while dying, I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called for plagues to choke me with sand, with blood. Bad luck was my god. I stretched out in the muck. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played tricks on insanity.

And Spring brought me the frightening laugh of the idiot.

So, just recently, when I found myself on the brink of the final squawk! it dawned on me to look again for the key to that ancient party where I might find my appetite once more.

Charity is that key.—This inspiration proves I was dreaming!

"You'll always be a hyena etc. . . ," yells the devil, who'd crowned me with such pretty poppies. "Deserve death with all your appetites, your selfishness, and all the capital sins!"

Ah! I've been through too much:-But, sweet Satan, I beg of you, a less blazing eye! and while waiting for the new little cowardly gestures yet to come, since you like an absence of descriptive or didactic skills in a writer, let me rip out these few ghastly pages from my notebook of the damned.

[stlukesguild]

Now there's teen angst of genius. By the way... "an amoral homosexual teenager who becomes a reserved, hard-working, responsible and respectable adult merchant and explorer?" Is that what they call deserting from the Dutch Colonial Army, smuggling and dealing arms in Abyssinia?

[quasimodo1]

An extended, ultimate euphemism. I wasn't aware Rimbaud was an old time arms dealer. Where did you get that information? Bio?

[Bitterfly]

Ah, I love Rimbaud. His Illuminations are also very beautiful. And his "Drunken Boat" - here's a translation of it (seems weird in prose):
(And by the way, yes, he was an arms dealer at one period of his life; it's even a quite well-known fact.)

As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers, I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers : gaudy Redskins had taken them for targets, nailing them naked to coloured stakes.

I cared nothing for all my crews, carrying Flemish wheat or English cottons. When, along with my haulers, those uproars were done with, the Rivers let me sail downstream where I pleased.

Into the ferocious tide-rips, last winter, more absorbed than the minds of children, I ran ! And the unmoored Peninsulas never endured more triumphant clamourings. The storm made bliss of my sea-borne awakenings. Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves which men call eternal rollers of victims, for ten nights, without once missing the foolish eye of the harbor lights !

Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children, the green water penetrated my pinewood hull and washed me clean of the bluish wine-stains and the splashes of vomit, carrying away both rudder and anchor.

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, devouring the green azures ; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, a dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down ; where, suddenly dying the bluenesses- deliriums and slow rhythms under the gleams of the daylight, stronger than alcohol, vaster than music-ferment the bitter rednesses of love ! I have come to know the skies splitting with lightnings, and the waterspouts, and the breakers and currents ; I know the evening, and Dawn rising up like a flock of doves, and sometimes I have seen what men have imagined they saw!

I have seen the low-hanging sun speckled with mystic horrors lighting up long violet coagulations like the performers in antique dramas ; waves rolling back into the distances their shiverings of venetian blinds !

I have dreamed of the green night of the dazzled snows, the kiss rising slowly to the eyes of the seas, the circulation of undreamed-of saps, and the yellow-blue awakenings of singing phosphorus !

I have followed, for whole months on end, the swells battering the reefs like hysterical herds of cows, never dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys could muzzle by force the snorting Oceans !

I have struck, do you realize, incredible Floridas, where mingle with flowers the eyes of panthers in human skins ! Rainbows stretched like bridles under the seas-horizon to glaucous herds !

I have seen the enormous swamps seething, traps where a whole leviathan rots in the reeds !

Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calm, and distances cataracting down into abysses !

Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals ! Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs where the giant snakes, devoured by vermin, fall from the twisted trees with black odours !

I should have liked to show to children those dolphins of the blue wave, those golden, those singing fishes.- Foam of flowers rocked my driftings, and at times ineffable winds would lend me wings.

Sometimes, a martyr weary of poles and zones, the sea whose sobs sweetened my rollings lifted my shadow-flowers with their yellow sucking disks toward me, and I hung there like a kneeling woman... [I was] almost an island, tossing on my beaches the brawls and droppings of pale-eyed, clamouring birds. And I was scudding along when across my frayed cordage drowned men sank backwards into sleep !...

But now I, a boat lost under the hair of coves, hurled by the hurricane into the birdless ether ; I, whose wreck, dead-drunk and sodden with water, neither Monitor nor Hanse ships would have fished up ; free, smoking, risen from violet fogs, I who bored through the wall of the reddening sky which bears a sweetmeat good poets find delicious : lichens of sunlight [mixed] with azure snot ; who ran, speckled with lunula of electricity, a crazy plank with black sea-horses for escort, when Julys were crushing with cudgel blows skies of ultramarine into burning funnels ; I who trembled to feel at fifty league's distance the groans of Behemoth's rutting, and of the dense Maelstroms ; eternal spinner of blue immobilities, I long for Europe with it's age-old parapets !

I have seen archipelagos of stars ! and islands whose delirious skies are open to sailers : - Do you sleep, are you exiled in those bottomless nights, O million golden birds, Life Force of the future ?

But, truly, I have wept too much ! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter : sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours. O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom !

If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the black cold pool where into the scented twilight a child squatting full of sadness launches a boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.

I can no more, bathed in your langours, O waves, sail in the wake of the carriers of cottons ; nor undergo the pride of the flags and pennants ; nor pull past the horrible eyes of the hulks.

[JBI]

SAID THE CANOE
Crawford, Isabella Valancy (1850-1887)

MY masters twain made me a bed
Of pine-boughs resinous, and cedar;
Of moss, a soft and gentle breeder
Of dreams of rest; and me they spread
With furry skins and, laughing, said:
"Now she shall lay her polished sides
As queens do rest, or dainty brides,
Our slender lady of the tides!"

My masters twain their camp-soul lit;
Streamed incense from the hissing cones;
Large crimson flashes grew and whirled;
Thin golden nerves of sly light curled
Round the dun camp; and rose faint zones,
Half way about each grim bole knit,
Like a shy child that would bedeck
With its soft clasp a Brave's red neck,
Yet sees the rough shield on his breast,
The awful plumes shake on his crest,
And, fearful, drops his timid face,
Nor dares complete the sweet embrace.

Into the hollow hearts of brakes--
Yet warm from sides of does and stags
Passed to the crisp, dark river-flags--
Sinuous, red as copper-snakes,
Sharp-headed serpents, made of light,
Glided and hid themselves in night.

My masters twain the slaughtered deer
Hung on forked boughs with thongs of leather:
Bound were his stiff, slim feet together,
His eyes like dead stars cold and drear.
The wandering firelight drew near
And laid its wide palm, red and anxious,
On the sharp splendour of his branches,
On the white foam grown hard and sere
On flank and shoulder.
Death--hard as breast of granite boulder--
Under his lashes
Peered thro' his eyes at his life's grey ashes.

My masters twain sang songs that wove--
As they burnished hunting-blade and rifle--
A golden thread with a cobweb trifle,
Loud of the chase and low of love:

"O Love! art thou a silver fish,
Shy of the line and shy of gaffing,
Which we do follow, fierce, yet laughing,
Casting at thee the light-winged wish?
And at the last shall we bring thee up
From the crystal darkness, under the cup
Of lily folden
On broad leaves golden?

"O Love! art thou a silver deer
With feet as swift as wing of swallow,
While we with rushing arrows follow?
And at the last shall we draw near
And o'er thy velvet neck cast thongs
Woven of roses, stars and songs--
New chains all moulden
Of rare gems olden?"

They hung the slaughtered fish like swords
On saplings slender; like scimitars,
Bright, and ruddied from new-dead wars,
Blazed in the light the scaly hordes.

They piled up boughs beneath the trees,
Of cedar web and green fir tassel.
Low did the pointed pine tops rustle,
The camp-fire blushed to the tender breeze.

The hounds laid dewlaps on the ground
With needles of pine, sweet, soft and rusty,
Dreamed of the dead stag stout and lusty;
A bat by the red flames wove its round.

The darkness built its wigwam walls
Close round the camp, and at its curtain
Pressed shapes, thin, woven and uncertain
As white locks of tall waterfalls.

[JBI]

O Mistress Mine by William Shakespeare, from Twelfth Night


O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear! Your truelove's coming,
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further, pretty sweeting.
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know.


What is love? 'Tis not hereafter.
Present mirth hath present laughter.
What's to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty.
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

[JBI]

The Passionate Shepherd to his Love by Christopher Marlowe

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle:

A gown made of the finest wool,
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold:

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning;
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

[JBI]

The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Raleigh

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall,

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten--
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.