Henry King (poet)

Henry King (1592 – 30 September 1669) was an English poet and clergyman who served as Bishop of Chichester from 1642 till death.

Quotes

• Sleep on (my Love!) in thy cold bed
  Never to be disquieted.
  My last Good-night! Thou wilt not wake
  Till I thy fate shall overtake:
  Till age, or grief, or sickness must
  Marry my body to that dust
  It so much loves; and fill the room
  My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.
  Stay for me there: I will not fail
  To meet thee in that hollow vale.
  And think not much of my delay;
  I am already on the way,
  And follow thee with all the speed
  Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
  • "An Exequy", l. 81, in Poems, p. 57

• But hark! My pulse, like a soft drum
  Beats my approach, tells thee I come;
  And, slow howe’er my marches be,
  I shall at last sit down by thee.
  The thought of this bids me go on,
  And wait my dissolution
  With hope and comfort. Dear! (forgive
  The crime) I am content to live
  Divided, with but half a heart,
  Till we shall meet and never part.
  • "An Exequy", l. 111

• We that did nothing study but the way
  To love each other, with which thoughts the day
  Rose with delight to us, and with them set,
  Must learn the hateful art, how to forget.
  • "The Surrender", l. 5, in Poems, p. 24
  • Formerly attributed to Thomas Carew. See: William Hazlitt (ed.) The Poems of Thomas Carew (1870), p. 68

• Prodigious might that union prove,
  Where Night and Day together move,
  And the conjunction of our lips
  Not kisses make but an eclipse;
  In which the mixed black and white
  Portends more terrour than delight.
  • "The Boy's answer" to "A Blackamore Maid to a fair Boy", printed, from MS., in The Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 12 (July 1742), p. 384, col. 2. See: Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 275–6, and Laurence Mason, English Poems of Henry King (New Haven, 1914), pp. 16–17

External links

• Jean Klene (ed.) The Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS. V.b.198 (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), p. 30