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Home  »  Elizabethan Sonnets  »  The Sixth Decade. Sonnet II. To live in hell, and heaven to behold

Seccombe and Arber, comps. Elizabethan Sonnets. 1904.

Diana

The Sixth Decade. Sonnet II. To live in hell, and heaven to behold

Henry Constable (1562–1613)

TO live in hell, and heaven to behold;

To welcome life, and die a living death;

To sweat with heat, and yet be freezing cold;

To grasp at stars, and lie the earth beneath;

To tread a maze that never shall have end;

To burn in sighs, and starve in daily tears;

To climb a hill, and never to descend;

Giants to kill, and quake at childish fears;

To pine for food, and watch th’Hesperian tree:

To thirst for drink, and nectar still to draw;

To live accurs’d, whom men hold blest to be;

And weep those wrongs which never creature saw:

If this be love, if love in these be founded,

My heart is love, for these in it are grounded.