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Home  »  Elizabethan Sonnets  »  Sonnet XVIII. O, She must love my sorrows to assuage

Seccombe and Arber, comps. Elizabethan Sonnets. 1904.

Fidessa

Sonnet XVIII. O, She must love my sorrows to assuage

Bartholomew Griffin (d. 1602)

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!