The Passionate Pilgrim

Chapter 2: I

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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.

I

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unskilful in the world’s false forgeries.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although I know my years be past the best,
I smiling credit her false-speaking tongue,
Outfacing faults in love with love’s ill rest.
But wherefore says my love that she is young?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is a soothing tongue,
And age, in love, loves not to have years told.
Therefore, I’ll lie with love, and love with me,
Since that our faults in love thus smother’d be.