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Home  »  Elizabethan Sonnets  »  Introductory: Go, wailing verse! the infant of my love

Seccombe and Arber, comps. Elizabethan Sonnets. 1904.

Sonnets after Astrophel, etc.

Introductory: Go, wailing verse! the infant of my love

Samuel Daniel (1562–1619)

Poems & Sonnets
Of Sundry Other
Noblemen and Gentlemen

The Author of this Poem, S[amuel]. D[aniel].

[The following section, consisting of twenty-eight sonnets and seven songs alone figures in the first (surreptitious) quarto of 1591; it was not reprinted in the authorised folio edition of Sidney’s Arcadia and other works in 1598. Twenty-three of these sonnets reappeared in Daniel’s authorised sonnet-collection, entitled Delia of 1592, and twenty-two in what Daniel designed to be the finally revised edition of Delia of 1594. Cf. vol. ii., 116 seq. Five of these sonnets, which are duly indicated below, were not reprinted by Daniel at any time.]

GO, wailing verse! the infant of my love—

MINERVA-like, brought forth without a mother—

That bears the image of the cares I prove;

Witness your father’s grief exceeds all other.

Sigh out a story of her cruel deeds,

With interrupted accents of despair:

A monument that whosoever reads,

May justly praise and blame my loveless Fair.

Say! her disdain hath dried up my blood,

And starvèd you, in succours still denying.

Press to her eyes! importune me some good!

Waken her sleeping cruelty with crying!

Knock at her hard heart! Say! I perish for her!

And fear this deed will make the world abhor her.