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Odes (1619)
TO MY WORTHY FRIEND
MASTER JOHN SAVAGE
OF THE INNER TEMPLE
UPON this sinful earth
If man can happy be,
And higher than his birth,
Friend, take him thus from me.
Whom promise not deceives
That he the breach should rue,
Nor constant reason leaves
Opinion to pursue.
To raise his mean estate
That soothes no wanton's sin;
Doth that preferment hate
That virtue doth not win.
Nor bravery doth admire,
Nor doth more love profess
To that he doth desire
Than that he doth possess.
Loose humour nor to please
That neither spares nor spends,
But by discretion weighs
What is to needful ends.
To him, deserving not,
Not yielding, nor doth hold
What is not his, doing what
He ought, not what he could.
Whom the base tyrants' will
So much could never awe,
As him for good or ill
From honesty to draw.
Whose constancy doth rise
'Bove undeserved spite,
Whose valour's to despise
That most doth him delight.
That early leave doth take
Of th' world, though to his pain,
For virtue's only sake,
And not till need constrain.
No man can be so free,
Though in imperial seat,
Nor eminent as he
That deemeth nothing great.
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Source:
Beeching, H. C., ed. A Selection from the Poetry of Samuel Daniel & Michael Drayton.
London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1899. 97-98.
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Created by Anniina Jokinen on September 19, 2022.
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Field of the Cloth of Gold, 1520
Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536
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Elizabethan Theatre
See section
English Renaissance Drama
Images of London:
London in the time of Henry VII. MS. Roy. 16 F. ii.
London, 1510, the earliest view in print
Map of England from Saxton's Descriptio Angliae, 1579
Location Map of Elizabethan London
Plan of the Bankside, Southwark, in Shakespeare's time
Detail of Norden's Map of the Bankside, 1593
Bull and Bear Baiting Rings from the Agas Map (1569-1590, pub. 1631)
Sketch of the Swan Theatre, c. 1596
Westminster in the Seventeenth Century, by Hollar
Visscher's Panoramic View of London, 1616. COLOR
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Michael Drayton
