Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544 – 1590)
French poet.
Turning our seed-wheat-kennel tares,
To burn-grain thistle, and to vaporie darnel,
Cockle, wild oats, rough burs, corn-cumbring
Tares.
Who well lives, long lives; for this age of ours
Should not be numbered by years, daies, and hours.
Or savage beasts upon a thousand hils.
Bright-flaming, heat-full fire,
The source of motion.
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.
Hot and cold, and moist and dry.
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.