Verses and Sonnets

Chapter 4: HOMAGE.

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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.

HOMAGE.

There is a light around your head

Which only Saints of God may wear,

And all the flowers on which you tread

In pleasaunce more than ours have fed,

And supped the essential air

Whose summer is a-pulse with music everywhere.

II.

For you are younger than the mornings are

That in the mountains break;

When upland shepherds see their only star

Pale on the dawn, and make

In his surcease the hours,

The early hours of all their happy circuit take.