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Sonnet LIV
by Sir Philip Sidney

English poet, courtier, patron of poets and scholars. One of the great literary figures of Elizabethan England, his heroic prose romance, the Arcadia (1580, revised 1584) was the most important work of prose fiction in sixteenth-century England. He wrote the first great Elizabethan sonnet cycles, Astrophil and Stella (1582), a sequence of one hundred and eight sonnets and eleven songs which explore the mind of the lover. His Defense of Poesie (1589) was the finest work of Elizabethan literary criticism. His successful experiments and technique influenced many other Renaissance poets like Spenser, Campion, Drayton and Jonson.


Astrophel and Stella
Sonnet LIV
by Sir Philip Sidney

Because I breathe not love to every one,
Nor do not use set colours for to wear,
Nor nourish special locks of vowed hair,
Nor give each speech a full point of a groan,
The courtly nymphs, acquainted with the moan
Of them who in their lips Love's standard bear,
"What, he!" say they of me, "now I dare swear
He cannot love. No, no, let him alone." -
And think so still, so Stella know my mind!
Profess indeed I do not Cupid's art;
But you, fair maids, at length this true shall find,
That his right badge is worn but in the heart.
Dumb swans, not chattering pies, do lovers prove:
They love indeed who quake to say they love.


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