Ring Out Your Bells

By Sir Philip Sidney 1554–1586 Philip Sidney

Ring out your bells, let mourning shows be spread;

For Love is dead—

All love is dead, infected

With plague of deep disdain;

Worth, as nought worth, rejected,

And Faith fair scorn doth gain.

From so ungrateful fancy,

From such a female franzy,

From them that use men thus,

Good Lord, deliver us!

Weep, neighbours, weep; do you not hear it said

That Love is dead?

His death-bed, peacock's folly;

His winding-sheet is shame;

His will, false-seeming holy;

His sole exec'tor, blame.

From so ungrateful fancy,

From such a female franzy,

From them that use men thus,

Good Lord, deliver us!

Let dirge be sung and trentals rightly read,

For Love is dead;

Sir Wrong his tomb ordaineth

My mistress' marble heart,

Which epitaph containeth,

"Her eyes were once his dart."

From so ungrateful fancy,

From such a female franzy,

From them that use men thus,

Good Lord, deliver us!

Alas, I lie, rage hath this error bred;

Love is not dead;

Love is not dead, but sleepeth

In her unmatched mind,

Where she his counsel keepeth,

Till due desert she find.

Therefore from so vile fancy,

To call such wit a franzy,

Who Love can temper thus,

Good Lord, deliver us!

Biography

The grandson of the Duke of Northumberland and heir presumptive to the earls of Leicester and Warwick, Sir Philip Sidney was not himself a nobleman. Today he is closely associated in the popular imagination with the court of Elizabeth I, though he spent relatively little time at the English court, and until his appointment as governor of Flushing in 1585 received little preferment from Elizabeth. Viewed in his own age as the . . .

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