poem 20
On the memory of Mr. Edward King, drown'd in the Irish Seas
I like not tears in tune, nor do I prize (Tears = elegies)
His artificial grief that scans his eyes:
Mine weep down pious beads, but why should I
Confine them to the Muses's rosary?
I am no poet here: my pen's the spout
Where the rain-water of my eyes runs out,
In pity of that name, whose fate we see
Thus copied out in grief's hydrography. (hydrography = writing in water)
The Muses are not mermaids, though upon
His death the ocean might turn Helicon.
The sea's too rough for verse: who rhymes upon't
With Xerxes strives to fetter Hellespont. (Xerxes built a bridge over the Hellespont)
My tears will keep no channel, know no laws
To guide their stream, but like the waves, their cause,
Run with disturbance till they swallow me
As a description of misery.
But can his spacious virtue find a grave
Within th'imposthum'd bubble of a wave? (imposthum'd = swollen)
Whose learning if we sound, we must confess
The sea but shallow, and him bottomless.
Could not the winds to countermand thy death
With their whole card of lungs redeem thy breath? (card of lungs =winds from all points of
Or some new island in thy rescue peep of the compass)
To heave thy resurrection from the deep,
That so the world might see thy safety wrought
With no less miracle than thyself was thought?
Some have affirmed, that what on earth we find,
The sea can parallel in shape and kind:
Books, arts, and tongues were wanting, but in thee
Neptune hath got an university.
We'll dive no more for pearls: the hope to see
Thy sacred reliques of mortality.
What can we now expect? Water and fire
Both elements our ruin do conspire.
And that dissolves us which doth us compound,
One Vatican burnt, another drown'd. (Vatican .. thought to mean Library)
We of the gown our libraries must toss
To understand the greatness of our loss:
Be pupils to our grief and so much grow
In learning as our sorrows overflow.
When we have fill'd the rundlets of our eyes (rundlets = small streams)
We'll issue forth, and vent such elegies
As that our tears shall seem the Irish Seas
We, floating islands, living Hebrides.
(By John Cleveland, (1613 - 1658), published 1638. He is probably better known for 'The Antiplatonick', a delightful plea for wooers to cease dilly-dallying , beginning with the words
' For shame, thou everlasting Woer,
Still saying Grace, and never fall to her!
Love that's in Contemplation plac't
Is Venus drawn but to the wast.'
I have shamelessly excised about ten lines from the above poem which needed too many notes to aid comprehension.)