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Home  »  The Book of Elizabethan Verse  »  William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

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

A Lover’s Dirge

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

From “Twelfth-Night,” Act II. Scene 4

COME away, come away, death,

And in sad cypress let me be laid;

Fly away, fly away, breath;

I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,

O prepare it!

My part of death, no one so true

Did share it.

Not a flower, not a flower sweet,

On my black coffin let there be strown;

Not a friend, not a friend greet

My poor corse, where my bones shall be thrown:

A thousand thousand sighs to save,

Lay me, O, where

Sad true lover never find my grave

To weep there!