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Verses and Sonnets

Chapter 13: THE CHECK.
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About This Book

This collection assembles sonnets, short lyrics, grotesques and epigrams that shift between playful satire and serious meditation. Poems evoke nocturnal reverie, pastoral songs, seasonal sonnets for each month, and compact narrative sketches, while recurring themes include youth and ageing, love and honour, music and faith, mortality and urban poverty. Formal variety—from polished sonnet sequences to biting epigrams—allows intimate love poems to sit beside comic portraits and moral reflections, producing a compact, varied lyrical volume that alternates tenderness, irony, and moral urgency across domestic, religious, and public scenes.

THE CHECK.

Shall any man for whose dear love another
Has thrown away his wealth and name in one,
Shall he turn scoffer of a more than brother,
To mock his needs when his desires are done?
Or shall a low-born boy whose mother won him
In great men great concerns his little place,
Turn, when his farthing honours come upon him,
To note her yeoman air and conscious grace?
Then mock me as you do my narrow scope,
For you it was put out this light of mine,
Traitrously wrecked my new adventured hope,
Wasted my wordy wealth, spilt my rich wine,
Made my square ship within a league of shore,
Alas! to be entombed in seas and seen no more.