A Lover Out of Fashion
by Sir John Davies

5 10 15

Faith (wench), I cannot court thy sprightly eyes With the bass viol placed between my thighs. I cannot lisp, nor to some fiddle sing, Nor run upon a high-stretched minikin.° I cannot whine in puling° elegies, Entombing Cupid with sad obsequies. I am not fashioned for these amorous times To court thy beauty with lascivious rhymes. I cannot dally, caper, dance and sing, Oiling my saint with supple sonneting. I cannot cross my arms, or sigh, Ay me, Ay me, forlorn — Egregious foppery! I cannot buss° thy fist, play with thy hair, Swearing by Jove thou art most debonair. Not I, by cock! But shall I tell the roundly, Hark in thine ear: Zounds, I can (        )1 thee soundly. 1. Printed thus, with space for four letters.

instrument string. whining kiss

[AJ Note: This poem was originally published with Sir John Davies' Epigrams, together with Christopher Marlowe's Ovid's Elegies. The author was attributed as "Ignoto" ("Unknown"), but it has been ascribed to Sir John Davies in the 20th century, most notably by Robert Krueger and Ruby Nemser in their edition of The Poems of Sir John Davies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), and subsequently by Gordon Braden (Sixteenth-Century Poetry, Oxford: Blackwell Pub, 2005), Patrick Cheney (Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and others.]

Text Source:
Sixteenth-century Poetry. Gordon Braden, Ed.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 513.

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