O she must love my sorrows to assuage.
O God, what joy felt I when she did smile,
Whom killing grief before did cause to rage!
Beauty is able sorrow to beguile.
Out, traitor absence! thou dost hinder me,
And mak'st my mistress often to forget,
Causing me to rail upon her cruelty,
Whilst thou my suit injuriously dost let;
Again her presence doth astonish me,
And strikes me dumb as if my sense were gone;
Oh, is not this a strange perplexity?
In presence dumb, she hears not absent moan;
Thus absent presence, present absence maketh,
That hearing my poor suit, she it mistaketh.


XIX

My pain paints out my love in doleful verse,
The lively glass wherein she may behold it;
My verse her wrong to me doth still rehearse,
But so as it lamenteth to unfold it.
Myself with ceaseless tears my harms bewail,
And her obdurate heart not to be moved;
Though long-continued woes my senses fail,
And curse the day, the hour when first I loved.
She takes the glass wherein herself she sees,
In bloody colours cruelly depainted;
And her poor prisoner humbly on his knees,