Walsingham

This is the archive for the Jewelry Poetry Page of the Beadshaper web site. Every month a piece of jewelry on the Beadshaper site is named after a classic poem. To see the Beadshaper site, please click Beadshaper . The following poem is the one for the month of September, 2007

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Walsingham
by Sir Walter Raleigh

'As you came from the holy land
Of Walsingham,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?'

'How shall I know your true love,
That have met many one
As I went to the holy land,
That have come, that have gone?'

'She is neither white nor brown,
But as the heavens fair,
There is none hath a form so divine
In the earth or the air.'

'Such an one did I meet, good Sir,
Such an angelic face,
Who like a queen, like a nymph did appear
By her gait, by her grace.'

'She hath left me here all alone,
All alone as unknow,
Who sometimes did me lead with herself,
And loved me as her own.'

'What's the the cause that she leaves you alone
And a new way doth take,
Who loved you once as her own
And her joy did you make?'

'I have loved her all my youth,
But now old as you see,
Love like not the falling fruit
From the withered tree.

'Know that Love is a careless child,
And forgets promise past;
He is blind, he is deaf when he list
And in faith never fast.

'His desire is a dureless content
And a trustless joy;
He is won with a world of despair
And is lost with a toy.

'Of womenkind such indeed is the love
Or the world have abused,
Under which many childish desires
And conceits are excused.

'But true love is a durable fire
In the mind ever burning;
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning.'