“O hateful, vaporous, and foggy night,
Since thou art guilty of my cureless crime,
Muster thy mists to meet the eastern light,
Make war against proportioned course of time;
Or if thou wilt permit the sun to climb
His wonted height, yet ere he go to bed,
Knit poisonous clouds about his golden head.
“With rotten damps ravish the morning air;
Let their exhaled unwholesome breaths make sick
The life of purity, the supreme fair,
Ere he arrive his weary noontide prick.
And let thy misty vapours march so thick,
That in their smoky ranks his smothered light
May set at noon and make perpetual night.
“Were Tarquin night, as he is but night’s child,
The silver-shining queen he would distain;
Her twinkling handmaids too, by him defiled,
Through Night’s black bosom should not peep again.
So should I have co-partners in my pain;
And fellowship in woe doth woe assuage,
As palmers’ chat makes short their pilgrimage.
“Where now I have no one to blush with me,
To cross their arms and hang their heads with mine,
To mask their brows, and hide their infamy;
But I alone alone must sit and pine,
Seasoning the earth with showers of silver brine,
Mingling my talk with tears, my grief with groans,
Poor wasting monuments of lasting moans.
“O night, thou furnace of foul reeking smoke,
Let not the jealous day behold that face
Which underneath thy black all-hiding cloak
Immodesty lies martyred with disgrace!
Keep still possession of thy gloomy place,
That all the faults which in thy reign are made
May likewise be sepulchred in thy shade.
“Make me not object to the tell-tale day.
The light will show charactered in my brow
The story of sweet chastity’s decay,
The impious breach of holy wedlock vow.
Yea, the illiterate, that know not how
To cipher what is writ in learned books,
Will quote my loathsome trespass in my looks.
“The nurse, to still her child, will tell my story
And fright her crying babe with Tarquin’s name.
The orator, to deck his oratory,
Will couple my reproach to Tarquin’s shame.
Feast-finding minstrels, tuning my defame,
Will tie the hearers to attend each line,
How Tarquin wronged me, I Collatine.
“Let my good name, that senseless reputation,
For Collatine’s dear love be kept unspotted.
If that be made a theme for disputation,
The branches of another root are rotted,
And undeserved reproach to him allotted
That is as clear from this attaint of mine
As I, ere this, was pure to Collatine.
“O unseen shame, invisible disgrace!
O unfelt sore, crest-wounding, private scar!
Reproach is stamped in Collatinus’ face,
And Tarquin’s eye may read the mot afar,
How he in peace is wounded, not in war.
Alas, how many bear such shameful blows,
Which not themselves, but he that gives them knows!
“If, Collatine, thine honour lay in me,
From me by strong assault it is bereft.
My honey lost, and I, a drone-like bee,
Have no perfection of my summer left,
But robbed and ransacked by injurious theft.
In thy weak hive a wand’ring wasp hath crept,
And sucked the honey which thy chaste bee kept.