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What cunning can express
The favour of her face?
To whom in this distress,
I do appeal for grace.
A thousand Cupids fly
About her gentle eye.
From which each throws a dart,
That kindleth soft sweet fire:
Within my sighing heart,
Possessed by Desire.
No sweeter life I try,
Than in her love to die.
The lily in the field,
That glories in his white,
For pureness now must yield,
And render up his right;
Heaven pictured in her face,
Doth promise joy and grace.
Fair Cynthia's silver light,
That beats on running streams,
Compares not with her white,
Whose hairs are all sun-beams;
So bright my Nymph doth shine,
As day unto my eyne.
With this there is a red,
Exceeds the Damask-Rose;
Which in her cheeks is spread,
Whence every favour grows.
In sky there is no star,
But she surmounts it far.
When Phoebus from the bed
Of Thetis doth arise,
The morning blushing red,
In fair carnation wise;
He shows in my Nymph's face,
As Queen of every grace.
This pleasant lily white,
This taint of roseate red;
This Cynthia's silver light,
This sweet fair Dea spread;
These sunbeams in mine eye,
These beauties make me die
In The Taming of the Shrew the handsome young Lucentio says, shortly after seeing beautiful Bianca (and knowing virtually nothing about her), "I burn, I pine, I perish, Tranio, / If I achieve not this young modest girl."
Lucentio does achieve her, and they marry and they live happily ever after kind of. At the end of the play there's a contest to see whose wife is most obedient, and Lucentio loses because Bianca has better things to do than come when her husband calls for her. He complains, and gets a reply, the last words we hear her say to her loving husband, "The more fool you, for laying on my duty."
And in As You Like It Orlando falls in love with Rosalind (and she with him), but they both have to run away to the Forest of Arden, where Rosalind, unknown to Orlando, has disguised herself as a boy, and that boy, Ganymede, persuades Orlando that he can cure Orlando of his love for Rosalind by pretending to be Rosalind. Got it? In this charade, "Rosalind" says she won't have Orlando, and he therefore says he will just die, but she advises him to have someone else do the dying for him, because, "men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love."
| BTW--This stuff never goes away: See The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face |
| NAVIGATION: | Index English 340 Materials | Index of Dr. Weller's Class Material |