Sir Philip Sidney. [The nightingale].

Sir Philip Sidney

CERTAIN SONNETS

Song.

WHO hath his fancy pleasèd
With fruits of happy sight;
Let here his eyes be raisèd,
On Nature's sweetest light;
A light which doth dissever
And yet unite the eyes,
A light which, dying never,
Is cause the looker dies.

She never dies, but lasteth
In life of lover's heart;
He ever dies that wasteth
In love his chiefest part:
Thus is her life still guarded
In never-dying faith;
Thus is his death rewarded,
Since she lives in his death.

Look then, and die! The pleasure
Doth answer well the pain:
Small loss of mortal treasure
Who may immortal gain!
Immortal be her graces,
Immortal is her mind;
They fit for heavenly places—
This, heaven in it doth bind.

But eyes these beauties see not,
Nor sense that grace descries;
Yet eyes deprivèd be not
From sight of her fair eyes—
Which, as of inward glory
They are the outward seal,
So may they live still sorry,
Which die not in that weal.

But who hath fancies pleasèd
With fruits of happy sight,
Let here his eyes be raisèd
On Nature's sweetest light!

Source:
The Book of Elizabethan Verse.
William Stanley Braithwaite, ed.
Boston: Herbert B. Turner & Co., 1907. 81-82.

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