Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville :: :: University of Virginia Library

In those yeeres, when our Sense, Desire and Wit,
Combine, that Reason shall not rule the heart;
Pleasure is chosen as a Goddesse fit,
The wealth of Nature freely to impart;
Who like an Idoll doth apparel'd sit
In all the glories of Opinions art;
The further off, the greater beauty showing,
Lost onely, or made lesse by perfect knowing.

Which faire Vsurper runnes a Rebels way,
For though elect of Sense, Wit and Desire,
Yet rules she none, but such as will obey,
And to that end becomes what they aspire;
Making that torment, which before was play,
Those dewes to kindle, which did quench the fire:
Now Honours image, now againe like lust,
But earthly still, and end repenting must.

While man, who Satyr-like, then knowes the flame,
When kissing of her faire appearing light,
Hee feeles a scorching power hid in the same,
Which cannot be reuealed to the sight,

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Yet doth by ouer heat so shrinke this frame,
Of fiery apparitions in delight;
That as in Orbes, where many passions raigne,
What one Affection ioyes, the rest complaine.

In which confused sphere Man being plac'd
With equall prospect ouer good or ill;
The one unknowne, the other in distaste,
Flesh, with her many moulds of Change and Will,
So his affections carries on, and casts
In declination to the errour still;
As by the truth he gets no other light,
But to see Vice, a restlesse infinite.

By which true mappe of his Mortality,
Mans many Idols are at once defaced,
And all hypocrisies of fraile humanity,
Either exiled, waued, or disgraced;
Falne nature by the streames of vanity,
Forc'd vp to call for grace aboue her placed:
Whence from the depth of fatall desolation,
Springs vp the height of his Regeneration.

Which light of life doth all those shadowes warre
Of woe and lust, that dazell and inthrall,
Whereby mans ioyes with goodnesse bounded are,
And to remorse his feares transformed all;
His sixe dayes labour past, and that cleere starre,
Figure of Sabboths rest, rais'd by this fall;
For God comes not till man be ouerthrowne;
Peace is the seed of grace, in dead flesh sowne.

Flesh but the Top, which onely Whips make goe,
The Steele whose rust is by afflictions worne,
The Dust which good men from their feet must throw,
A liuing-dead thing, till it be new borne,
A Phenix-life, that from selfe-ruine growes,
Or Viper rather through her parents torne,
A boat, to which the world it selfe is Sea,
Wherein the minde sayles on her fatall way.