love poem

Dear swallow, when you come back with the new year, you weave your nest; and in winter you disappear to the Nile or Memphis.
Love builds ever a nest in my heart; one Desire is winged there and another is an egg and another already half-hatched; and ever comes the cry of the gaping nestlings. And the larger feed the lesser loves.
Those who feed straightway conceive others. What is to be done then? I cannot out-clamour all these loves!

The Muses bound Love in garlands and gave him to Beauty.
And now the Cytherean brings a ransom to have Love set free.
If any one does free him he will not leave but stay; he has learned to be a slave.

Nature, Creations law, is judg'd by sense,
Not by the Tyrant conscience.
Then our commission gives us leave to doe
What youth and pleasure prompts us to:
For we must question else heavens great decree,
And taxe it with a Treachery;
If things made sweet to tempt our appetite
Should with a guilt staine the delight.
Higher powers rule us, our selves can nothing doe;
Who made us love, made 't lawfull too.

Once Eros, mid the roses,
A sleeping bee awakened,
Which on the finger stung him.
His heart was filled with sorrow.

Half-running and half-flying,
He sought his goddess mother,
The beautiful Kythera:
" Alas, O mother, " crying,

" Olola, I am dying!
A little winged serpent,
A bee, the shepherds name it,
Has stung me on my finger. "

His mother said: " If bee-stings
Are found to be so painful,
Thou seest how mortals suffer
When wounded by thy arrows! "

The threads of my life are bound to you, Myiscus, and in you is all the breath my soul retains.
By your eyes, your eyes which speak even to the blind, by your clear brow, if you turn to me a darkened eye it is winter for me, but if you look happy, dear spring itself flowers for me!

A goddess, queen of Desires, gives me to you, Theocles, and soft-sandalled Love brings me naked to you, a stranger in a strange land, governed by Love's unbreakable reins. If only I could make a real friendship with you!
But you reject me, neither does time alter you nor the tokens of friendship.
Be gracious, O king, be gracious! Fate has made you a god and you hold the threads of life and death for me.

Why do you weep, deceiver? Why do you throw down your arrows and bow and droop your twin wings? Surely proud Myiscus must have burned you with his eyes? How bitterly you now learn to endure what you first caused!

O pipes of the goatherds, sing no more in the hills of Daphnis to please Pan, the lover of goats; and, O lyre, interpreter of Phoebus, sing no more of Hyacinthus crowned with virgin laurel.
This indeed might be when Daphnis lived in the hills, when Hyacinthus was lovely to you; but now Dion holds the sceptre of the Desires.

Myrtilla, I have seen you eat —
Have heard you drink, to be precise —
Your soup, and, notwithstanding, sweet,
The gurgitation wasn't nice,
I overlooked a tiny fault
Like that with just a grain of salt.

And, sweetest maid in all New York,
When all ungracefully you pierce
The toothsome oyster with your fork
I realize you're pretty fierce:
But such a feat, be't understood,
Nor Venus nor Diana could.

I've seen you hang, high in the air,
A stalk of fresh asparagus,
Guiding its succulence to where

Almighty God, unchangeable,
Who framed the universe entire
Thy truth to see;
Thou who for loving us so well
Didst in Thine agony expire
On Calvary;
Since with such suffering didst deign
To make amend for our transgression
O Agnus Dei.
Placed with the thief let us obtain
Salvation in his grief's confession: