IGNOTO
by: Christopher Marlowe
(1564-1593)
- LOVE thee
not for sacred chastity.
- Who loves for that? nor for thy sprightly wit:
- I love thee not for thy sweet modesty,
- Which makes thee in perfection's throne to sit.
- I love thee not for thy enchanting eye,
- Thy beauty, ravishing perfection:
- I love thee not for that my soul doth dance,
- And leap with pleasure when those lips of thine,
- Give musical and graceful utterance,
- To some (by thee made happy) poet's line.
- I love thee not for voice or slender small,
- But wilt thou know wherefore? Fair sweet, for all.
-
- 'Faith, wench! I cannot court thy sprightly eyes,
- With the base viol placed between my thighs:
- I cannot lisp, nor to some fiddle sing,
- Nor run upon a high stretching minikin.
- I cannot whine in puling elegies.
- Entombing Cupid with sad obsequies:
- I am not fashioned for these amorous times,
- To court thy beauty with lascivious rhymes:
- I cannot dally, caper, dance and sing,
- Oiling my saint with supple sonneting:
- I cannot cross my arms, or sigh "Ah me,"
- "Ah me forlorn!" egregious foppery!
- I cannot buss thy fill, play with thy hair,
- Swearing by Jove, "Thou art most debonnaire!"
- Not I, by cock! but I shall tell thee roundly,
- Hark in thine ear, zounds I can ____ thee soundly.
-
- Sweet wench, I love thee; yet I will not sue,
- Or show my love as musky courtiers do;
- I'll not carouse a health to honour thee,
- In this same bezzling drunken courtesy:
- And when all's quaffed, eat up my bousinglass,
- In glory that I am thy servile ass.
- Nor will I wear a rotten Bourbon lock,
- As some sworn peasant to a female mock.
- Well-featured lass, thou know'st I love thee dear,
- Yet for thy sake I will not bore mine ear,
- To hang thy dirty silken shoe-tires there:
- Not for thy love will I once gnash a brick,
- Or some pied colours in my bonnet stick.
- But by the chaps of hell, to do thee good,
- I'll freely spend my thrice decocted blood.
"Ignoto" is reprinted
from Poetica Erotica. Ed. T.R. Smith. New York: Crown
Publishers, 1921. |
MORE POEMS BY CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE |
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