Gateway to the Classics: Oxford Book of English Verse, Part 1 by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Oxford Book of English Verse, Part 1

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Table of Contents

Of a Rose, a Lovely Rose

Spring Song of the Birds

Robin and Makyne

The Bludy Serk

To a Lady

In Honour of the City of London

On the Nativity of Christ

Lament for the Makers

May in the Green-Wood

Carol

Quia Amore Langueo

The Nut-Brown Maid

As Ye Came from the Holy Land

The Lover in Winter Plaineth for the Spring

Balow

The Old Cloak

To Mistress Margery Wentworth

To Mistress Margaret Hussey

Vixi Puellis Nuper Idoneus

To His Lute

Description of Spring

Complaint of the Absence of Her Lover

The Means to Attain Happy Life

A True Love

A Bequest of His Heart

The Night Is Near Gone

Jolly Good Ale and Old

When Flora Had O'erfret the Firth

Lusty May

My Heart Is High Above

A Praise of His Lady

To Her Sea-Faring Lover

The Faithless Shepherdess

Crabbed Age and Youth

Icarus

How Can the Heart Forget Her?

Since First I Saw Your Face

There Is a Lady Sweet and Kind

Love Not Me For Comely Grace

Splendidis Longum Valedico Nugis

On the Death of Sir Philip Sidney

Love Is a Sickness

Ulysses and the Siren

Beauty, Time, and Love

To the Virginian Voyage

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Her Reply

Icarus

From Robert Jones's Second Book of Songs or Airs (1601)

Love wing'd my Hopes and taught me how to fly

Far from base earth, but not to mount too high:

For true pleasure
Lives in measure,
Which if men forsake,
Blinded they into folly run and grief for pleasure take.

But my vain Hopes, proud of their new-taught flight,

Enamour'd sought to woo the sun's fair light,

Whose rich brightness
Moved their lightness
To aspire so high
That all scorch'd and consumed with fire now drown'd in woe they lie.

And none but Love their woeful hap did rue,

For Love did know that their desires were true;

Though fate frownéd,

And now drownéd

They in sorrow dwell,

It was the purest light of heav'n for whose fair love they fell.

— Anonymous

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