Sonnet 100: Oh Tears, No Tears

Oh tears, no tears, but rain from Beauty's skies,

Making those lilies and those roses grow,

Which aye most fair, now more than most fair show,

While graceful Pity Beauty beautifies.

Oh honeyed sighs, which from that breast do rise,

Whose pants do make unspilling cream to flow,

Wing'd with whose breath, so pleasing zephyrs blow

As can refresh the hell where my soul fries.

Oh plaints conserv'd in such a sugar'd phrase

That Eloquence itself envies your praise

While sobb'd-out words a perfect music give.

Such tears, sighs, plaints, no sorrow is but joy:

Or if such heav'nly signs must prove annoy,

All mirth farewell, let me in sorrow live.

Philp Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney (born November 30, 1554, Penshurst, Kent, England—died October 17, 1586, Arnhem, Netherlands) Elizabethan courtier, statesman, soldier, poet, and patron of scholars and poets, considered the ideal gentleman of his day. After Shakespeare’s sonnets, Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella is considered the finest Elizabethan sonnet cycle. His The Defence of Poesie introduced the critical ideas of Renaissance theorists to England. He was buried at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on February 16, 1587, with an elaborate funeral of a type usually reserved for great noblemen. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and scholars throughout Europe issued memorial volumes in his honour, while almost every English poet composed verses in his praise. He won this adulation even though he had accomplished no action of consequence; it would be possible to write a history of Elizabethan political and military affairs without so much as mentioning his name. It is not what he did but what he was that made him so widely admired: the embodiment of the Elizabethan ideal of gentlemanly virtue.

More poems from same author

Sonnet 1: Loving In Truth Sonnet 13: Phoebus Was Judge Sonnet 20: Fly, Fly, My Friends Sonnet 24: Rich Fools There Be Sonnet 101: Stella Is Sick

Sonnet 100: Oh Tears, No Tears

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