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Verses and Sonnets

Chapter 9: LOVE AND HONOUR.
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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.

LOVE AND HONOUR.

Love wooing Honour, Honour’s love did win,
And had his pleasure all a summer’s day.
Not understanding how the dooms begin,
Love wooing Honour, wooed her life away.
Then wandered he for full five years’ unrest,
Until, one night, this Honour that had died
Came as he woke, in youth grown glorified,
And smiling like the saints whom God has blest.
But when he saw her in the dear night shine
Serene, with more than mortal light upon her,
The boy that careless was of things divine,
Small Love, turned penitent to worship Honour.
So Love can conquer Honour; when that’s past,
Dead Honour risen outdoes Love at last.