The Passionate Pilgrim

Chapter 9: VIII

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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.

VIII

If music and sweet poetry agree,
As they must needs, the sister and the brother,
Then must the love be great ’twixt thee and me,
Because thou lov’st the one and I the other.
Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such
As passing all conceit, needs no defence.
Thou lov’st to hear the sweet melodious sound
That Phœbus’ lute, the queen of music, makes;
And I in deep delight am chiefly drown’d
Whenas himself to singing he betakes.
One god is god of both, as poets feign;
One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.