English

Look as a well-grown, stately-headed buck,
But lately by the woodman's arrow struck,
Runs gadding o'er the lawns, or nimbly strays
Among the cumbrous brakes a thousand ways,
Now through the high-wood scours, then by the brooks,
On every hillside, and each vale he looks,
If 'mongst their store of simples may be found
An hero to draw and heal his smarting wound,
But when he long hath sought, and all in vain,
Steals to the covert closely back again,
Where round engirt with fern more highly sprung,

Now wanders Pan the arched groves, and hills
Where fairies often danc'd, and shepherds' quills
In sweet contentions pass'd the tedious day:
Yet, being early, in his unknown way
Met not a shepherd, nor on all the plain
A flock then feeding saw, nor of his train
One jolly satyr stirring yet abroad,
Of whom he might inquire; this to the load
Of his affliction adds. Now he invokes
Those nymphs in mighty forests that with oaks
Have equal fates, each with her several tree
Receiving birth and ending destiny:

Once (yet that once too often) heretofore
The silver Ladon on his sandy shore
Heard my complaints, and those cool groves that be
Shading the breast of lovely Arcady
Witnesse[d] the tears which I for Syrinx spent:
Syrinx the fair, from whom the instrument
That fills your feasts with joy (which when I blow
Draws to the sagging dug milk white as snow),
Had his beginning. This enough had been
To show the Fates, my deemed sisters, teen.
Here had they stay'd, this adage had been none:
“That our disasters never come alone.”

In lovely May when Titan's golden rays
Make odds in hours between the nights and days,
And weigheth almost down the once-even scale
Where night and day by th' Equinoctial
Were laid in balance, as his pow'r he bent
To banish Cynthia from her regiment
To Latmus' stately hill, and with his light
To rule the upper world both day and night;
Making the poor Antipodes to fear
A like conjunction 'twixt great Jupiter
And some Alcmena new, or that the sun
From their horizon did obliquely run:
This time the swains and maidens of the Isle

Yet that their happy voyage might not be
Without time's short'ner, heaven-taught melody
(Music that lent feet to the stable woods,
And in their currents turn'd the mighty floods:
Sorrow's sweet nurse, yet keeping joy alive:
Sad discontent's most welcome corrosive:
The soul of Art, best lov'd when Love is by:
The kind inspirer of sweet Poesy,
Lest thou shouldst wanting be, when swans would fain
Have sung one song, and never sung again,)
The gentle shepherd hasting to the shore
Began this lay, and tim'd it with his oar:

For as with hanging head I have beheld
A widow vine stand in a naked field,
Unhusbanded, neglected, all forlorn,
Brows'd on by deer, by cattle cropp'd and torn;
Unpropp'd, unsuccoured by stake or tree
From wreakful storms' impetuous tyranny,
When, had a willing hand lent kind redress,
Her pregnant bunches might from out the press
Have sent a liquor both for taste and show
No less divine than those of Malligo:
Such was this wight, and such she might have been.
She both th' extremes hath felt of Fortune's teen,

By this was Philocel returning back,
And in his hand the lady; for whose wrack
Nature had clean foresworn to frame a wight
So wholly pure, so truly exquisite;
But more deform'd and from a rough-hewn mould,
Since what is best lives seldom to be old,
Within their sight was fairest Cælia now;
Who drawing near, the life-priz'd golden bough
Her love beheld. And as a mother kind
What time the new-cloth'd trees by gusts of wind
Unmov'd, stand wistly list'ning to those lays
The feather'd quiristers upon their sprays

And now from all at once my leave I take
With this petition, that when thou shalt wake,
My tears already spent may serve for thine,
And all thy sorrows be excus'd by mine!
Yea, rather than my loss should draw on hers,
(Hear, Heaven, the suit which my sad soul prefers!)
Let this her slumber, like Oblivion's stream,
Make her believe our love was but a dream!
Let me be dead in her as to the earth,
Ere Nature lose the grace of such a birth.
Sleep thou, sweet soul, from all disquiet free,
And since I now beguile thy destiny,

Thus came she to the place (where aged men,
Maidens and wives, and youth and children
That had but newly learnt their mother's name,
Had almost spent their tears before she came,)
And those her earnest and related words
Threw from her breast; and unto them affords
These as the means to further her pretence:
Receive not on your souls, by innocence
Wrong'd, lasting stains which from a sluice the sea
May still wash o'er, but never wash away.
Turn all your wraths on me: for here behold
The hand that tore your sacred tree of gold;

O that thou wert no actor in this play,
My sweetest Cælia! or divorc'd away
From me in this: O Nature! I confess
I cannot look upon her heaviness
Without betraying that infirmity
Which at my birth thy hand bestow'd on me.
Would I had died when I receiv'd my birth!
Or known the grave before I knew the earth!
Heavens! I but one life did receive from you,
And must so short a loan be paid with two?
Cannot I die but like that brutish stem
Which have their best belov'd to die with them?
O let her live! some bless'd power hear my cry!