Song
by Aphra Behn
O Love! that
stronger art than wine,
Pleasing delusion,
witchery divine,
Wont to be prized
above all wealth,
Disease that has
more joys than health;
Though we
blaspheme thee in our pain,
And of thy tyranny
complain,
We are all
bettered by thy reign.
What reason never
can bestow
We to this useful
passion owe;
Love wakes the
dull from sluggish ease,
And learns a clown
the art to please,
Humbles the vain,
kindles the cold,
Makes misers free,
and cowards bold;
’Tis he reforms
the sot from drink,
And teaches airy
fops to think.
When full brute
appetite is fed,
And choked the
glutton lies and dead,
Thou new spirits
dost dispense
And ’finest the
gross delights of sense:
Virtue’s
unconquerable aid
That against
Nature can persuade,
And makes a roving
mind retire
Within the bounds
of just desire;
Cheerer of age,
youth’s kind unrest,
And half the
heaven of the blest!
Aphra Behn, (14 December 1640? (baptismal date)–16 April 1689) was a
British playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer from the Restoration era. As one of
the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural
barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women
authors. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphra_Behn
British
modernist author Virginia Woolf 1882-1943) paid tribute to her in A Room of One´s Own (1929): All women together,
ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who
earned them the right to speak their minds... Behn proved that money could be
made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and
so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind
but was of practical importance.
