A POEME OF DAUNCING.
1.
Where liues the man that neuer yet did heare
Of chaste Penelope, Ulisses' Queene?
Who kept her faith vnspotted twentie yeare,
Till he return'd that farre away had beene,
And many men, and many townes had seen:
Ten yeare at siege of Troy he lingring lay,
And ten yeare in the Mid-land-Sea did stray.
2.
Homer, to whom the Muses did carouse
A great deepe cup with heauenly nectar filld:
The greatest, deepest cup in Ioue's great house,
(For Ioue himselfe had so expresly willd)
He dranke off all, ne let one drop be spilld;
Since when, his braine that had before been drie,
Became the well-spring of all Poetrie.
3.
Homer doth tell in his aboundant verse,
The long laborious trauailes of the Man;
And of his lady too he doth reherse,
How shee illudes with all the art she can,
Th' vngratefull loue which other lords began;
For of her lord, false Fame long since had sworn,
That Neptune's monsters had his carkase torne.
4.
All this he tells, but one thing he forgot,
One thing most worthy his eternall song;
But he was old, and blind, and saw it not,
Or else he thought he should Ulisses wrong,
To mingle it his tragike acts among;
Yet was there not in all the world of things,
A sweeter burden for his Muse's wings.