Torture has such an ear, I understand
He pays large sums to stop a German Band.
The public taste is quite a different thing,
Torture is positively paid to sing.
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.