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The Passionate Pilgrim

Chapter 13: XII
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About This Book

The collection assembles short lyric poems and sonnets that probe varied aspects of romantic experience—infatuation, betrayal, longing, and the tension between youth and age. Individual pieces shift between playful flirtation and melancholy meditation, employing images of music, flowers, and classical myth to explore desire, faithlessness, beauty’s transience, and art’s consolations. Voices alternate among confident bravado, rueful self-awareness, and ironic detachment, producing a compact but diverse emotional range across tightly composed lyrics. The sequence highlights the instability of vows and appearances, the rivalries of competing affections, and the ways poetry preserves, reshapes, and questions longing.

XII

Crabbed age and youth cannot live together:
Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care;
Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather;
Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare.
Youth is full of sport, age’s breath is short;
    Youth is nimble, age is lame;
Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold;
    Youth is wild, and age is tame.
Age, I do abhor thee; youth, I do adore thee;
    O, my love, my love is young!
Age, I do defy thee. O, sweet shepherd, hie thee,
For methinks thou stay’st too long.