John Milton - Lycidas (1638)

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Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

John Milton
Enjoy your dear wit and gay rhetoric, That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence.

John Milton
I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,
And virtue has no tongue to check her pride.

John Milton
He knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.

John Milton
Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freakt with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well-attir'd woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears.

John Milton
But O the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone and never must return!

John Milton
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

John Milton
He touch'd the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay.

John Milton
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas?

John Milton
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace, and nothing said;
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.

John Milton
Their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw,
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.

John Milton
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield; and both together heard
What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,
Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night.

John Milton
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.

John Milton
Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.

John Milton
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world.

John Milton
It was that fatal and perfidious bark,
Built in th' eclipse, and rigged with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

John Milton
Blind mouths! That scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook.

John Milton
Last came, and last did go,
The Pilot of the Galilean lake;
Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,
(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain).

John Milton
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days.

John Milton
Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.

John Milton
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed;
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walked the waves.

John Milton