Select poems of Edward Hovel Thurlow :: :: University of Virginia Library

You, O lovely swallow, fly,
Annual, through the laughing sky,
Every year our meadows seek,
With the musick of your beak,
And build your nest in Summer-time,
Herald of the flowery prime:
But, when pallid Winter throws
Heaps of rain, and floods of snows,
And chills, disconsolate, the air,
To Nile, or Memphis you repair.

But, always, Love, a foe to rest,
In my heart constructs a nest;
He is no annual architect,
Nor heat, nor cold can him affect;
He always builds; and thence there springs
Now a small Love, endued with wings;

One in the egg is yet; and one
Half from the broken egg is gone;
And always a small clamour springs
Of peeping Loves, that ask their wings.
The greater Loves, me to distress,
Feed, and bring forth to flight, the less;
And these, when to full age they grow,
Again breed others to my woe;
So that, the live-long year, I find,
In me Love propagates his kind.

And, then, what remedy can be
To this, my infelicity?
I have not strength, alas! to bear
So many Loves, that fill the air
With tender cries, and murmuring care!