Charles Best (1570-1627). The Moon. William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. 1907. The Book of Elizabethan Verse

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

The Moon

By Charles Best (1570–1627)


LOOK 1 how the pale queen of the silent night
Doth cause the ocean to attend upon her,
And he, as long as she is in his sight,
With his full tide is ready her to honour;
But when the silver waggon of the Moon	5
Is mounted up so high he cannot follow,
The sea calls home his crystal waves to moan
And with low ebb doth manifest his sorrow.
So you, that are the sovereign of my heart,
Have all my joys attending on your will,	10
My joys low-ebbing when you do depart—
When you return, their tide my heart doth fill
So as you come, and as you do depart,
Joys ebb and flow within my tender heart.

Note 1. Included in Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody, 1602. Of Charles Best little is known. He has verses before Robert Pricket’s Honours Fame in Triumph Riding, 1604, and Sir William Leighton’s Tears or Lamentations of a Sorrowful Soule, 1614, which probably belong to Christopher Brooke. John Davies of Hereford addressed an epigram to “My kind friend, Mr. Charles Best” (among the Epigrams to Writing Persons in The Scourge of Folly, 1610–11). [back]

CONTENTS · GLOSSARY · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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