The Passionate Pilgrim

Chapter 14: XIII

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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.

XIII

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good,
A shining gloss that vadeth suddenly;
A flower that dies when first it ’gins to bud;
A brittle glass that’s broken presently:
A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower,
Lost, vaded, broken, dead within an hour.

And as goods lost are seld or never found,
As vaded gloss no rubbing will refresh,
As flowers dead lie wither’d on the ground,
As broken glass no cement can redress,
So beauty blemish’d once, for ever’s lost,
In spite of physic, painting, pain and cost.