Love, Fate, Love's object, and cold Jealousy,
Delight me, and torment, content me, and afflict.
The insensate boy, the blind and sinister,
The loftiest beauty, and my death alone
Show to me paradise, and take away,
Present me with all good, and steal it from me,
So that the heart, the mind, the spirit, and the soul,
Have joy, pain, cold, and weight in their control.
Who will deliver me from war?
Who give to me the fruit of love in peace?
And that which vexes that which pleases me
(Opening the gates of heaven and closing them)
Who will set far apart
To make acceptable my fires and tears?
He shows the reason and origin of passion; and whence it is conceived;
and how enthusiasm is born, by ploughing the field of the Muses and
scattering the seed of his thoughts and waiting for the fruitful
harvest, discovering in himself the fervour of the affections instead of
in the sun, and in place of the rain is the moisture of his eyes. He
brings forward four things: Love, Fate, the Object, and Jealousy. Here
love is not a low, ignoble, and unworthy motor, but a noble lord and
chief. Fate is none other than the pre-ordained disposition and order of
casualties to which he is subject by his destiny. The object is the
thing loved and the correlative of the lover. Jealousy, it is clear,
must be the ardour of the lover about the thing loved, of which it boots
not to speak to him who knows what love is, and which it is vain to try
to explain to others. Love delights, because to him who loves it is a
pleasure to love; and he who really loves would not cease from loving.
This is referred to in the following sonnet:
5.
Beloved, sweet, and honourable wound,
From fairest dart that love did choose,
Lofty, most beauteous and potential zeal,
That makes the soul in its own flames find weal!
What power or spell of herb or magic art
Can tear thee from the centre of my heart,
Since he, who with an ever-growing zest,
Tormenting most, yet most does make me blest?
How can I of this weight unburdened be,
If pain the cure, and joy the sore give me?
Sweet is my pain: to this world new and rare.
Eyes! ye are the bow and torches of my lord!
Double the flames and arrows in my breast,
For languishing is sweet and burning best.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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