Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544 – 1590)
French poet.
Hot and cold, and moist and dry.
Living from hand to mouth.
And reads, though running, all these needful motions.
Only that he may conform
To tyrant custom.
Did thrust as now in others' corn his sickle.
Flesh of thy flesh, nor yet bone of thy bone.
What is well done is done soon enough.
Apoplexie and lethargie,
As forlorn hope, assault the enemy.
Even as a surgeon, minding off to cut
Some cureless limb,—before in ure he put
His violent engins on the vicious member,
Bringeth his patient in a senseless slumber,
And grief-less then (guided by use and art),
To save the whole, sawes off th' infested part.
Two souls in one, two hearts into one heart.
Dog, ounce, bear, and bull,
Wolfe, lion, horse.
Who breaks his faith, no faith is held with him.
Bright-flaming, heat-full fire,
The source of motion.
To man the earth seems altogether
No more a mother, but a step-dame rather.
Soft carpet-knights, all scenting musk and amber.
In every hedge and ditch both day and night
We fear our death, of every leafe affright.
Which serves for cynosure
To all that sail upon the sea obscure.
My lovely living boy,
My hope, my hap, my love, my life, my joy.
Much like the French (or like ourselves, their apes),
Who with strange habit do disguise their shapes;
Who loving novels, full of affectation,
Receive the manners of each other nation.