A web-based edition of early seventeenth-century political poetry from manuscript sources. It brings into the public domain over 350 poems, many of which have never before been published.
Pii14 Sorrow and Joy at once possesse my brest
Notes. This poem is written in the assassin’s voice—indeed the copy in BL MS Sloane 826 is attributed to him—and functions as a kind of imagined gallows speech, subverting the political message of the assassin’s rather conventional repentance, delivered from the scaffold at his execution on 29 November.
“Feltons Farewell”
Sorrow and Joy at once possesse my brest.
How can such Contraries together rest?
I greive my Frends and Countrie thus to leave.
I joy I did it of her Foe bereave.
My greife is private, as of flesh and blood
5My Joy is publique: ’Tis a publique good.
Let none lament my losse: For, you shall finde,
By losse y’have gained in another kinde.
Since hee that Caused all your Ill is gone,
Ne’re mourne for him that good could doe to none,
10But onely pray propitious heavens would send,
For him soe great a Foe, as great a frend.
Source. BL MS Sloane 826, fols. 193v-194r
Other known sources. Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 26, fol. 33v
Pii14
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