If either you would change your cruel heart,
Or, cruel still, time did your beauties stain:
If from my soul this love would once depart,
Or for my love some love I might obtain;
Then might I hope a change, or ease of mind,
By your good help, or in myself, to find.
But since my thoughts in thinking still are spent.
With reason's strife, by senses overthrown;
You fairer still, and still more cruel bent,
I loving still a love that loveth none:
I yield and strive, I kiss and curse the pain,
Thought, reason, sense, time, You, and I, maintain.
POEM: A FAREWELL
Oft have I mused, but now at length I find
Why those that die, men say, they do depart:
Depart: a word so gentle to my mind,
Weakly did seem to paint Death's ugly dart.
But now the stars, with their strange course, do bind
Me one to leave, with whom I leave my heart;
I hear a cry of spirits faint and blind,
That parting thus, my chiefest part I part.
Part of my life, the loathed part to me,
Lives to impart my weary clay some breath;
But that good part wherein all comforts be,
Now dead, doth show departure is a death:
Yea, worse than death, death parts both woe and joy,
From joy I part, still living in annoy.
* * *
Finding those beams, which I must ever love,
To mar my mind, and with my hurt to please,
I deemed it best, some absence for to prove,
If farther place might further me to ease.
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