William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Elizabethan Verse. 1907. | | Fair Is My Love for Aprils in Her Face | By Robert Greene (15581592) |
| FAIR 1 is my love for Aprils in her face: | |
Her lovely breasts September claims his part, | |
And lordly July in her eyes takes place, | |
But cold December dwelleth in her heart; | |
Blest be the months that set my thoughts on fire, | 5 |
Accurst that month that hindereth my desire. | |
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Like Phbus fire, so sparkle both her eyes, | |
As air perfumed with amber is her breath, | |
Like swelling waves, her lovely breasts do rise, | |
As earth her heart, cold, dateth me to death: | 10 |
Aye me, poor man, that on the earth do live, | |
When unkind earth, death and despair doth give! | |
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In pomp sits mercy seated in her face, | |
Love twixt her breasts his trophies doth imprint, | |
Her eyes shine favour, courtesy, and grace, | 15 |
But touch her heart, ah that is framed of flint! | |
Therefore my harvest in the grass bears grain; | |
The rock will wear, washed with a winters rain. 2 | |
| Note 1. From Perimedes the Blacksmith, 1588. In Morleys First Book of Madrigals (1594) there is a madrigal with the stanza: | April is in my mistress face, |
| And July in her eyes hath place; |
| Within her bosom is September, |
| But in her heart a cold December. |
Oliphant surmises, in the Musa Madrigalesca, p. 74, that both are translated from a foreign original. [back] | Note 2. Lines 17, 18, My harvest in the grass bears grain, and, The rock will wear, washed with a winters rain, are proverbs. Compare the opening lines of Greenes Doralicias Ditty: | In time we see that silver drops |
| The craggy stones make soft, etc. |
and also the stanza in a poem to which Prof. Schelling calls attention, signed M. T., published in The Paradise of Dainty Devises, beginning: | The sturdy rock for all his strength, |
| By raging seas is rent in twain; |
| The marble stone is pierced, at length, |
| With little drops of drizzling rain. |
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