Libraries of Tears
Time passes. Pain does not. And upon rapid reading, book with tear is stained.
Accept, thou shrine of my dead saint,Henry King. "The Exequy" in Seventeenth Century English Minor Poets edited by Anne Ferry.
Instead of dirges this complaint;
And for sweet flowers to crown thy hearse,
Receive a strew of weeping verse
From thy grieved friend, whom thou might'st see
Quite melted into tears for thee.
Dear loss! since thy untimely fate
My task hath been to meditate
On thee, on thee; thou art the book,
The library whereon I look,
Though almost blind. For thee (loved clay)
I languish out, not live, the day,
Using no other exercise
But what I practice with mine eyes;
By which wet glasses I find out
How lazily time creeps about
To one that mourns; this, only this,
My exercise and business is.
So I compute the weary hours
With sighs dissolvèd into showers.
And so for day 2161
12.11.2012
