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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
FRIAR BACON, by ROBERT GREENE Poet's Biography
First Line: Seeing you come as friends unto the friar
Last Line: From dover to the market-place of rye.
Subject(s): Art & Artists
First Line: Seeing you come as friends unto the friar
Last Line: From dover to the market-place of rye.
Subject(s): Art & Artists
Seeing you come as friends unto the friar,
Resolve you doctors, Bacon can by books
Make storming Boreas thunder from his cave,
And dim fair Luna to a dark eclipse.
The great arch-ruler, potentate of Hell,
Trembles, when Bacon bids him, or his fiends,
Bow to the force of his pentageron.
What Art can work, the frolic friar knows;
And therefore will I turn my magic books,
And strain out necromancy to the deep:
I have contriv'd and fram'd a head of brass
(I made Belcephon hammer out the stuff),
And that by Art shall read philosophy,
And I will strengthen England by my skill,
That if ten Cæsars lived and reign'd in Rome,
With all the legions Europe doth contain,
They should not touch a grass of English ground:
The work that Ninus rear'd at Babylon,
The brazen walls fram'd by Semiramis,
Carv'd out like to the portal of the sun;
Shall not be such as rings the English strand,
From Dover to the market-place of Rye.
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