Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Seccombe and Arber, comps. Elizabethan Sonnets. 1904.

Sonnets and Poetical Translations

XXXII. Ring out your bells! let mourning shows be spread

Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)

RING out your bells! let mourning shows be spread,

For LOVE is dead.

All love is dead, infected

With the plague of deep disdain;

Worth as nought worth rejected,

And faith, fair scorn doth gain.

From so ungrateful fancy,

From such a female frenzy,

From them that use men thus,

Good Lord deliver us!

Weep! neighbours, weep! Do you not hear it said

That LOVE is dead.

His deathbed, peacock’s Folly;

His winding sheet is Shame;

His will, False Seeming wholly;

His sole executor, BLAME.

From so ungrateful fancy,

From such a female frenzy,

From them that use men thus,

Good Lord deliver us!

Let dirige be sung, and trentals rightly read,

For LOVE is dead.

Sir WRONG his tomb ordaineth,

My mistress’ marble heart;

Which epitaph containeth

“Her eyes were once his dart.”

From so ungrateful fancy,

From such a female frenzy,

From them that use men thus,

Good Lord deliver us!

Alas, I lie. Rage hath this error bred.

LOVE is not dead.

LOVE is not dead, but sleepeth

In her unmatchèd mind:

Where she his counsel keepeth,

Till due deserts she find.

Therefore from so vile fancy,

To call such wit a frenzy:

Who love can temper thus,

Good Lord deliver us!