Fulke Greville (1554 – 1628)
Known before 1621 as Sir Fulke Greville, was a minor Elizabethan poet, dramatist, and statesman.
Page 1 of 1
Oh wearisome condition of Humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound,
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound:
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?
Passion and reason self-division cause.
Is it the mask or majesty of Power
To make offences that it may forgive?
Hard-hearted minds relent and rigor's tears abound,
And envy strangely rues his end, in whom no fault was found.
Knowledge her light hath lost, valor hath slain her knight,
Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight.
In night when colours all to black are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;
The eye — a watch to inward senses placed,
Not seeing, yet still having power of sight —
Gives vain alarums to the inward sense.
Now rime, the son of rage, which art no kin to skill,
And endless grief, which deads my life, yet knows not how to kill,
Go seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find,
Salute the stones that keep the bones that held so good a mind.
Three things there be in man's opinion dear,
Fame, many friends, and fortune's dignities:
False visions all, which in our sense appear,
To sanctify desire's idolatry.
If Nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
We that are bound by vows and by promotion,
With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,
To teach belief in good and still devotion,
To preach of heaven's wonders and delights —
Yet, when each of us in his own heart looks,
He finds the God there far unlike his books.
Page 1 of 1