"As Love and I, late harbour'd in one inn"

By Michael Drayton 1563–1631 Michael Drayton

As Love and I, late harbour’d in one inn,

With proverbs thus each other entertain:

In love there is no lack, thus I begin,

Fair words make fools, replieth he again;

Who spares to speak, doth spare to speed (quoth I),

As well (saith he) too forward, as too slow;

Fortune assists the boldest, I reply,

A hasty man (quoth he) ne’er wanted woe;

Labour is light, where love (quoth I) doth pay,

(Saith he) light burthen’s heavy, if far born;

(Quoth I) the main lost, cast the bye away;

You have spun a fair thread, he replies in scorn.

And having thus awhile each other thwarted,

Fools as we met, so fools again we parted.

Biography

In late-seventeenth-century estimates of literary stature, Michael Drayton ranks only slightly below Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson. Until the middle of the twentieth century, Drayton's position as an important minor poet seemed secure, but his lengthy historical poems did not lend themselves to the techniques of close reading popularized during the vogue of New Criticism in the 1940s and after. An . . .

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