Sixty-Five Sonnets With Prefatory Remarks on the Accordance of the Sonnet with the Powers of the English Language: Also, A Few Miscellaneous Poems [by Thomas Doubleday] |
Sixty-Five Sonnets | ||
71
XLV.
Crito, how well thy boisterous mirth keeps underThe modest men of wit, who must sit dumb;
Thou heedest not the disapproving hum
At thy forced jokes, but still, lest we should blunder,
Out bursts thy laugh, as duly as the thunder,
Like it, to tell us whence the flashes come,
And then so fiercely shake thy sides at some,
That how thy frame endures it is our wonder.
The painter Zeuxis, ancient authors say,
Was doom'd a strange and humorous death to know:
For having drawn a woman old and gray,
He with mad laughter brought the fatal blow;
Crito beware! thou'lt conjure up, one day,
Some stale, old, feeble jest to kill thee so.
Sixty-Five Sonnets | ||