Page:Romance of the Rose (Ellis), volume 1.pdf/248

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The silence, whose discordant song

Gives prophecy of woe and wrong,

Sad heralds, clad in hideousness.

Of evil happening and distress.

While winter doth to summer grow,

And summer fall to winter, flow

Two plenteous streams of diverse source,

And nought alike of kind or force.

The water of the one doth greet

All those who drink with savour sweet

Beyond compare, and he who tastes

Thereof but once, in nowise hastes

Him onward, but would gladly stay,

Drinking his fill, the livelong day;

But yet it quencheth not his thirst,

For eagerly as when he first

Had ta’en a sup, he drinketh still

As though no draught his pouch could fill.

The more one drinks the more doth he

Desire to quaff unendingly,

Nor doth his burning thirst abate,

Though he become intoxicate.

The strongest words were weak and waste

To tell the sweet enticing taste

These wretched sots experience, who,

Their drouth unquenched, must still pursue

Their maddening, monstrous draughts, for thirst

Infernal still, like souls accurst,

Consumes them, till at last they fall

Inflate, like victims dropsical.