Come, cheerful day, part of my life, to me;Related post: Sleep and Death.
For whilst thou view'st me with thy fading light,
Part of my life doth still depart with thee,
And I still onward haste to my last night.
Time's fatal wings do ever forward fly,
So every day we live a day we die.
But, O ye nights, ordained for barren rest,
How are my days deprived of life in you;
When heavy sleep my soul hath dispossessed
By feigned death life sweetly to renew.
Part of my life in that you life deny;
So every day we live a day we die.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, March 28, 2014
Night and Day
Thomas Campion (1567-1620), Two Books of Ayres, I.xvii, in English Madrigal Verse 1588-1632, ed. E.H. Fellowes, 2nd ed. (1929; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), pp. 333-334: