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Home  »  The Book of Elizabethan Verse  »  Thomas Campion (1567–1620)

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

Sleep, Angry Beauty, Sleep

Thomas Campion (1567–1620)

SLEEP, angry beauty, sleep, and fear not me!

For who a sleeping lion dares provoke?

It shall suffice me here to sit and see

Those lips shut up that never kindly spoke:

What sight can more content a lover’s mind

Than beauty seeming harmless, if not kind?

My words have charmed her, for secure she sleeps,

Though guilty much of wrong done to my love;

And in her slumber, see! she close-eyed weeps:

Dreams often more than waking passions move.

Plead, Sleep, my cause, and make her soft like thee,

That she in peace may wake and pity me.