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Home  »  The Book of Elizabethan Verse  »  Anonymous

William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Elizabethan Verse. 1907.

Love’s Keys

Anonymous

UNQUIET thoughts, your civil slaughter stint,

And wrap your wrongs within a pensive heart;

And you, my tongue, that makes my mouth a mint

And stamps my thoughts to coin them words by art,

Be still! for if you ever do the like,

I’ll cut the string that makes the hammer strike.

But what can stay my thoughts they may not start?

Or put my tongue in durance for to die?

Whenas these eyes, the keys of mouth and heart,

Open the lock where all my love doth lie;

I’ll seal them up within their lids for ever:

So thoughts and words and looks shall die together.