Caelica IV

By Baron Brooke Fulke Greville 1554–1628 Fulke Greville

You little stars that live in skies

And glory in Apollo’s glory,

In whose aspècts conjoinèd lies

The heaven’s will and nature’s story,

Joy to be likened to those eyes,

Which eyes make all eyes glad or sorry;

For when you force thoughts from above,

These overrule your force by love.

And thou, O Love, which in these eyes

Hast married Reason with Affection,

And made them saints of Beauty’s skies,

Where joys are shadows of perfection,

Lend me thy wings that I may rise

Up, not by worth, but thy election;

For I have vowed in strangest fashion

To love and never seek compassion.

Biography

Fulke Greville, first Lord Brooke, survived most of his contemporaries. His active literary life of almost fifty years (the late 1570s to the 1620s) makes him the principal courtly writer of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras (apart from his short-lived friend Sir Philip Sidney). Although some attention has been paid to him as a writer of short poems, the main interest in Greville has been focused not on his closet dramas Alaham . . .

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