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The Passionate Pilgrim

Chapter 6: V
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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.

V

If love make me forsworn, how shall I swear to love?
O never faith could hold, if not to beauty vowed.
Though to myself forsworn, to thee I’ll constant prove;
Those thoughts, to me like oaks, to thee like osiers bowed.
Study his bias leaves, and makes his book thine eyes,
Where all those pleasures live that art can comprehend.
If knowledge be the mark, to know thee shall suffice;
Well learned is that tongue that well can thee commend,
All ignorant that soul that sees thee without wonder;
Which is to me some praise, that I thy parts admire.
Thine eye Jove’s lightning seems, thy voice his dreadful thunder,
Which, not to anger bent, is music and sweet fire.
    Celestial as thou art, O do not love that wrong,
    To sing heaven’s praise with such an earthly tongue.