Contents
-BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Elizabethan Verse. 1907.
To a Mistress Dying
Sir William Davenant (16061668)
Lover.
Your beauty, ripe and calm and fresh | As eastern summers are, | Must now, forsaking time and flesh, | Add light to some small star. Philosopher. | Whilst she yet lives, were stars decayed, | Their light by hers relief might find; | But Death will lead her to a shade | Where Love is cold and Beauty blind. Lover. | Lovers, whose priests all poets are, | Think every mistress, when she dies, | Is changed at least into a star: | And who dares doubt the poets wise? Philosopher. | But ask not bodies doomed to die | To what abode they go; | Since Knowledge is but Sorrow’s spy, | It is not safe to know.
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