Anonymous. Love Winged My Hopes. William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. 1907. The Book of Elizabethan Verse

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

Love Winged My Hopes

Anonymous


LOVE 1 wing’d my Hopes and taught me how to fly
Far from base earth, but not to mount too high:
For true pleasure
Lives in measure,
Which if men forsake,	5
Blinded they into folly run and grief for pleasure take.

But my vain Hopes, proud of their new-taught flight,
Enamour’d sought to woo the sun’s fair light,
Whose rich brightness
Moved their lightness	10
To aspire so high
That, all scorch’d and consumed with fire, now drowned in woe they lie.

And none but Love their woful hap did rue,
For Love did know that their desires were true;
Though Fate frownèd,	15
And now drownèd
They in sorrow dwell,
It was the purest light of heaven for whose fair love they fell. 2

Note 1. From Robert Jones’ Second Book of Songs and Airs, 1601. [back]

Note 2. It was the purest light of heaven for whose fair love they fell. “I am reminded,” says Mr. Bullen, “of a fine passage in Drayton’s Barons’ Wars, canto vi.:

	“Looking upon proud Phaeton wrapped in fire,
	The gentle queen did much bewail his fall;
	But Mortimer commended his desire
	To lose one poor life or to govern all.
	‘What though,’ quoth he, ‘he madly did aspire
	And his great mind made him proud Fortune’s thrall?
	Yet, in despight when she her worst had done,
	He perished in the chariot of the sun.’”

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