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Home  »  Elizabethan Sonnets  »  Sonnet III. The heavens beheld the beauty of my Queen

Seccombe and Arber, comps. Elizabethan Sonnets. 1904.

Licia

Sonnet III. The heavens beheld the beauty of my Queen

Giles Fletcher (1586?–1623)

THE HEAVENS beheld the beauty of my Queen;

And all amazed, to wonder thus began:

“Why dotes not JOVE, as erst we all have seen,

And shapes himself like to a seemly man?

Mean are the matches which he sought before;

Like bloomless buds, too base to make compare:

And she alone hath treasured Beauty’s store;

In whom all gifts and princely graces are.”

CUPID replied, “I posted with the sun

To view the Maids that lived in all those days:

And none there was that might not well be won,

But She; most hard, most cold, made of delays.”

Heavens were deceived, and wrong they do esteem;

She hath no heat, although She living seem.