Samuel Daniel (1562-1619). Care-Charmer Sleep, Son of the Sable Night. William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. 1907. The Book of Elizabethan Verse

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

Care-Charmer Sleep, Son of the Sable Night

By Samuel Daniel (1562–1619)


CARE-CHARMER 1 Sleep, son of the sable night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born:
Relieve my languish and restore the light;
With dark forgetting of my care, return,
And let the day be time enough to mourn	5
The shipwrack of my ill-adventured youth:
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn
Without the torment of the night’s untruth.
Cease dreams, the images of day desires,
To model forth the passions of the morrow;	10
Never let rising sun approve you liars,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain,
And never wake to feel the day’s disdain.

Note 1. “Samuel Daniel had an eminently contemplative genius which might have anticipated the sonnet as it is in Wordsworth, but which the fashion of the day confined to the not wholly suitable subject of Love. In the splendid Care-charmer Sleep … he continued, as will be seen, to put his subject under the influence of his prevailing faculty.” (George Saintsbury, History of Elizabethan Literature, 1887.) Bartholomew Griffin, Gent., in his Fidessa, more Chaste than Kind 1596, has a sonnet reminiscent of this and the preceding numbers, which opens:

	Care-charmer Sleep, sweet ease in restless misery,
	The captive’s liberty, and his freedom’s song,
	Balm of the bruised heart, man’s chief felicity,
	Brother of quiet death, when life is too, too long.

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CONTENTS · GLOSSARY · BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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