On the 9th day of the Blog
chatter’s #WRITEAPAGEADAY, Here is a poem with love as the major theme.
Poet: Christopher Marlowe
Poem: Love at First Sight
( From Hero and Leander)
On this feast day, oh, cursed day and
hour !
Went Hero thorough Sestos, from her
tower
To Venus’s temple, where unhappily,
As after chanced, they did each other
spy.
So fair a church as this had Venus none;
The walls were off dicoloured jasper
stone
Where in was Proteus carved, and o’er
head
A lively vine of green sea – gate
spread,
Where by one hand light headed
Bacchus hung
And with the other wine from grapes
out –wrung.
Of crystal shining fair the pavement
was;
The town of Sestos called it Venus’ glass
There mighty you see the Gods in
sundry shapes,
Committing heady riots, incest,
rapes;
For know that underneath this radiant
floor
Was Danae’s statue in a brazen tower;
Jove slyly stealing from his sister’s
bed
To dally with Idalian Ganymede,
And for his love, Europa bellowing
loved,
And tumbling with the rainbow in a
cloud;
Blood – quaffing Mars heaving the
iron net
Which limping Vulcan and his Cyclops set;
Love kindling fire to burn such towns
as Troy;
Silvanus weeping for the lovely boy
That now is turned into a cypress
tree,
Under whose shade the wood – Gods
love to be
And in the midst a silver altar
stood;
There Hero sacrificing turtle’s
blood,
Vailed to the ground, vailing her
eyelids close,
And modestly they opened as she rose;
Thence flew love’s arrow with the golden head,
And thus Leander was enamoured.
Stone- still He stood, and ever more
He gazed,
Till with the fire that from his
countenance blazed
Relenting Hero’s gentle heart was
Strook;
Such force and virtue hathen amorous
look.
It lies not in our power to love or
hate,
For will in us is over –ruled by fate
When two are stripped, long ere the
course begin,
We wish that one should lose, the
other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots, like in each
respect.
The reason no man knows; let it
suffice,
What we behold is censured by our
eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is
slight;
Whoever loved, that loved not at
first sight?
Christopher Marlowe‘s (1564-1593) the
outstanding work, putting aside his four plays - the fragmentary Hero and
Leander is a poem of singular freshness and beauty. His genius had serious
limitations. Deficient as it was in humour, sympathetic insight and subtlety,
along its own lines it was supremely great.
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