Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 4.djvu/594

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552
POEMS 1816-1823.

6.

True, separations[1]
Ask more than patience;
What desperations
From such have risen!
But yet remaining,
What is't but chaining
Hearts which, once waning,
Beat 'gainst their prison?
Time can but cloy love,
And use destroy love:
The wingéd boy, Love,
Is but for boys—
You'll find it torture
Though sharper, shorter,
To wean, and not wear out your joys.

December 1, 1819.
[First published, New Monthly Magazine, 1832,
vol. xxxv. pp. 310-312.]


ODE TO A LADY WHOSE LOVER WAS KILLED BY A BALL, WHICH AT THE SAME TIME SHIVERED A PORTRAIT NEXT HIS HEART.

Motto.
On peut trouver des femmes qui n'ont jamais eu de galanterie, mais il est rare d'en trouver qui n'en aient jamais en qu'une.—[Réflexions ... du Duc de la Rochefoucauld, No. lxxiii.]

1.

Lady! in whose heroic port
And Beauty, Victor even of Time,
And haughty lineaments, appear
Much that is awful, more that's dear—
Wherever human hearts resort
There must have been for thee a Court,
And Thou by acclamation Queen,

Where never Sovereign yet had been.
  1. True separations.—[MS. G.]