No, I’ll not weep;
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Will break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep.
But sometimes the poet prevails over the satirist, and the mocking laughter is stifled with the sound of bitter weeping.
The first extract given below shows Byron in his bitter and cynical mood; the tone of the second and third is far removed from such asperity:
(1) Ovid’s a rake, as half his verses show him,
Anacreon’s morals are a still worse sample,
Catullus scarcely has a decent poem,
I don’t think Sappho’s Ode a good example,