Sonnets of Shakespeare's Ghost

Never before Imprinted
At Sydney By Angus & Robertson , and are to be solde by all booksellers 1920
The Spirit of William Shakespeare, sore vexed of them who say that in his Sonnets he writ not from the truth of his heart but from the toyings of his brain, and that he devised but a feigned object to fit a feigned affection, herein maketh answer, renewing as best a shadow may that rhyme wherein he was more excellent in the living body
THE wise world saith I not unlock’d my heart When I of thee and thy dear love did write, And would each word of mine to false convert, Doing my simple sense a double spite. It saith thou wert but shadow born of nought, But vain creation of an apish rhyme, While, Fashion’s fool, my strain’d invention sought To better them who best did please the time. But wherefore say they so, and do dear wrong To thee, whose worth was my sole argument, To me, whose verse ’twas truth alone made strong By that the breast must feel, not brain invent? They who this doubt never such beauty knew, Nor what to poet love alone can do.
THEY say a man ne’er bore such love to man, Or, if he did, ’twere but a cause for shame; But, speaking so, they their own measure scan, And blot their censure with self-blaming blame. For, thou being Beauty’s best, the best of me Worshipp’d but Beauty’s self and Beauty’s worth; My fire and air, my spirit, adorèd thee Unmix’d with gross compounding of my earth. And thou wert best of Truth, the first in grace Of all rich gems in Virtue’s carcanet; Then should I not love thee and give thee place Above all love of sense on woman set? In love of Beauty, whate’er shape ’tis in, There’s nought of Truth, if it must think of sin.
LOOK, when the rose to deep vermilion hue Adds that sweet odour gracious Nature gives, When his proud glory gladdens every view, And no base worm within his beauties lives, We nothing question of what sex it be, Nor ask more of it than that it should lend His lovely gaze for ravish’d eye to see, And on the blessed air his fragrance spend. We ask not that the star which lights the heaven Should be or male or female to our sense, Suffic’d in this, that it empearls the even, And happies all our under reverence. Then might’st not thou, who wert both rose and star, Be pure to me as these to others are?