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Home  »  Poetica Erotica  »  Sonnets to AureliaXIX. “Come, let us sigh a requiem over love”

T. R. Smith, comp. Poetica Erotica: Rare and Curious Amatory Verse. 1921–22.

Sonnets to AureliaXIX. “Come, let us sigh a requiem over love”

By Robert Nichols (1893–1944)
 
(From Aurelia & Other Poems, 1920)

COME, let us sigh a requiem over love
  That we ourselves have slain in love’s own bed,
Whose hearts that had courage to drink enough
  Lacked courage to forbid the taste they bred,
Which body captained soon, till, in disgust,        5
  These very hearts of bodily surfeit died,
Poisoned by that sweet overflow of lust
  Whose past delight our substance deified.
 
No courage, no, nor pleasure have we now,
  To our own frantic bodies are we tossed,        10
Only sometimes exhaustion will allow
  Us peace to observe the image of love’s ghost,
  With torturing voice and with hid face return
  Faintly, as even now, to bid us mourn.