STAY, should I answer, Lady, then In vain would be your question: Should I be dumb, why then again Your asking me would be in vain. Silence nor speech, on neither hand, Can satisfy this strange demand. Yet, since your will throws me upon This wished contradiction, I'll tell you how I did become So strangely, as you hear me, dumb. Ask but the chap-fallen Puritan; 'Tis zeal that tongue-ties that good man. (For heat of conscience all men hold Is th' only way to catch their cold.) How should Love's zealot then forbear To be your silenced minister? Nay, your Religion which doth grant A worship due to you, my Saint, Yet counts it that devotion wrong That does it in the Vulgar Tongue. My ruder words would give offence To such an hallowed excellence, As th' English dialect would vary The goodness of an Ave Mary. How can I speak that twice am checked By this and that religious sect? Still dumb, and in your face I spy Still cause and still divinity. As soon as blest with your salute, My manners taught me to be mute. For, lest they cancel all the bliss You signed with so divine a kiss, The lips you seal must needs consent Unto the tongue's imprisonment. My tongue in hold, my voice doth rise With a strange E-la to my eyes, Where it gets bail, and in that sense Begins a new-found eloquence. Oh listen with attentive sight To what my pratling eyes indite! Or, lady, since 'tis in your choice To give or to suspend my voice, With the same key set ope the door Wherewith you locked it fast before. Kiss once again, and when you thus Have doubly been miraculous, My Muse shall write with handmaid's duty The Golden Legend of your beauty. He whom his dumbness now confines But means to speak the rest by signs. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE LAST POST by ROBERT RANKE GRAVES ODE ON THE SPRING by THOMAS GRAY LITTLE JERRY, THE MILLER by JOHN GODFREY SAXE COURAGE THAT OVERCOMES by MARGARETE ROSE AKIN TWO SONNETS FROM NEW YORK: QUESTIONS by ADELAIDE NICHOLS BAKER THE MARCH BEE by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN RED COTTON NIGHT-CAP COUNTRY; OR, TURF AND TOWERS: PART 4 by ROBERT BROWNING A SOLILOQUY ON THE COURSE AND CONSQUENCE OF A DOUBTING MIND by JOHN BYROM |