Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, CHORUS, by SIDNEY GODOLPHIN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

CHORUS, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Vain man, born to no happiness
Last Line: Are since becalm'd, and feel no wind.
Subject(s): Love


VAIN man, born to no happiness,
But by the title of distress,
Allied to a capacity
Of joy, only by misery;
Whose pleasures are but remedies,
And best delights but the supplies
Of what he wants, who hath no sense
But poverty and indigence:
Is it not pain still to desire
And carry in our breast this fire?
Is it not deadness to have none,
And satisfied, are we not stone?
Doth not our chiefest bliss then lie
Betwixt thirst and satiety,
In the midway: which is alone
In an half-satisfaction:
And is not love the middle way,
At which with most delight we stay?
Desire is total indigence,
But love is ever a mixt sense
Of what we have, and what we want,
And though it be a little scant
Of satisfaction, yet we rest
In such an half-possession best.
A half-possession doth supply
The pleasure of variety,
And frees us from inconstancy
By want caused, or satiety;
He never lov'd, who doth confess
He wanted aught he doth possess,
(Love to itself is recompense
Besides the pleasure of the sense)
And he again who doth pretend
That surfeited his love took end,
Confesses in his love's decay
His soul more mortal than that clay
Which carries it, for if his mind
Be in its purest part confin'd,
(For such love is) and limited,
'Tis in the rest, dying, or dead:
They pass their times in dreams of love
When wavering passions gently move,
Through a calm smooth-fac'd sea they pass,
But in the haven traffic glass:
They who love truly through the clime
Of freezing North and scalding Line,
Sail to their joys, and have deep sense
Both of the loss, and recompense:
Yet strength of passion doth not prove
Infallibly, the truth of love.
Ships, which to-day a storm did find,
Are since becalm'd, and feel no wind.





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