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

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

To Music Bent Is My Retired Mind

Thomas Campion (1567–1620)

TO music bent is my retired mind

And fain would I some song of pleasure sing,

But in vain joys no comfort now I find;

From heavenly thoughts all true delight doth spring:

Thy power, O God, Thy mercies to record,

Will sweeten every note and every word.

All earthly pomp or beauty to express

Is but to carve in snow, in waves to write;

Celestial things, though men conceive them less,

Yet fullest are they in themselves of light:

Such beams they yield as know no means to die,

Such heat they cast as lifts the spirit high.