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Home  »  The Book of Elizabethan Verse  »  Thomas Carew (1595?–1639?)

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

If the Quick Spirits in Your Eye

Thomas Carew (1595?–1639?)

IF the quick spirits in your eye

Now languish and anon must die;

If every sweet and every grace

Must fly from that forsaken face;

Then, Celia, let us reap our joys

Ere Time such goodly fruit destroys.

Or if that golden fleece must grow

For ever free from agèd snow;

If those bright suns must know no shade,

Nor your fresh beauties ever fade;

Then fear not, Celia, to bestow

What, still being gathered, still must grow.

Thus either Time his sickle brings

In vain, or else in vain his wings.