A Shining Night in Amour Clad

   

This little piece was occasioned by a wedding, and  transmogrified with help from C. C. Wilson.

                           A SHINING NIGHT IN AMOUR CLAD

                                  Lines for Lovers: Male Variety                                                       

        One of our greatest poets made the simple cosmic claim that love makes the world go around.  An even greater poet limned its complex human reality starting with the sardonic claim that men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them but not for love.

     For comic defiance I am fond of Touchstone’s wry description of his Audrey:  A poor ill-favor’d thing, sir, but mine own.

     More seriously and perhaps most famously in Sonnet 116 which begins:

                Let me not to the marriage of true minds

                Admit impediment…

                [Love] is an ever-fixed mark,

                That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

                It is the star to every wandering bark.

     Many of us have learned much from becoming fast friends with both young and old lovers like (1) Romeo and Juliet, (2) Hamlet and Ophelia, (3) Othello and Desdemona, (4) Antony and Cleopatra and we could learn from (5) Rosalind and Orlando, (6) Hotspur and Kate, (7) Berowne and Rosaline (8) and the delightful BENEDICT and Beatrice.

     Every Gentle man (becoming a benedict) has thought these thoughts of his Lady Fair:  (I) cognition, (II) commitment, (III) comprehension, and (IIII) confidence.

      (I) Beshrew me, but I love her heartily;

              For she is wise, if I can judge of her,

              And fair she is, as she hath prov’d herself;

              And therefore, like herself, wise, fair, and true

              Shall she be placed in my constant soul.

     (II)  Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul

              But I do love thee! And when I love thee not

              Chaos is come again.

   (III) Love first learned in my lady’s eyes

             Lives not alone immured in the brain.

              A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.

               A lover’s ears will hear the lowest sound,

              And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods

              Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.

  (IIII) Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

               Her infinite variety.

And these lovely words repurposed:

             [When in sad] thoughts myself almost despising,

             Haply I think on thee,-and then my state, 

            Like to the lark at break of day arising

             From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

              For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings

              That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

  It is a Shining Night who can hear from his Lady Fare:

               My bounty is as boundless as the sea, 

               My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

               The more I have, for both are infinite.

   May God grant to us all the bounty of a boundless deep love.