A Supplication
by Abraham Cowley

English poet, dramatist and essayist. His poetry includes The Mistress, or Several Copies of Love Verses (1647) and Poems (1656). He is best known for his Pindaric Odes and his unfinished epic, The Davideis. He also wrote A Poem on the Late Civil War and several odes and elegies. His plays include The Guardian (1641), later revised as The Cutter of Coleman Street (1661). His prose writings include A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (1661) and many fine essays on general topics in the style of Montaigne. He is often described as the last poet of the Metaphysical school, writing The Mistress in the manner of Donne. But his style was mainly classical, more suited to the Augustan style of his successors like Dryden.

Abraham Cowley

A Supplication
by Abraham Cowley

Awake, awake, my Lyre!
And tell thy silent master's humble tale
In sounds that may prevail;
Sounds that gentle thoughts inspire:
Though so exalted she
And I so lowly be
Tell her, such different notes make all thy harmony.

Hark, how the strings awake!
And, though the moving hand approach not near,
Themselves with awful fear
A kind of numerous trembling make.
Now all thy forces try;
Now all thy charms apply;
Revenge upon her ear the conquests of her eye.

Weak Lyre! thy virtue sure
Is useless here, since thou art only found
To cure, but not to wound,
And she to wound, but not to cure,
Too weak too wilt thou prove
My passion to remove;
Physic to other ills, thou'rt nourishment to love.

Sleep, sleep again, my Lyre!
For thou canst never tell my humble tale
In sounds that will prevail,
Nor gentle thoughts in her inspire;
All thy vain mirth lay by,
Bid thy strings silent lie,
Sleep, sleep again, my Lyre, and let thy master die.

Abraham Cowley

A Supplication by Abraham Cowley