“Sleep, baby mine, Desire, nurse
Beauty singeth,
Thy cries, O baby, set mine head on aching;
The babe cries, ‘Way, thy love doth keep me waking’.”
Sir Philip Sidney, “Sleep, baby mine, Desire”
A raucous parody of a lullaby as the poet tries to lay aside his desire,
treated here as an unruly child. But why are there so few lullabies, satire or
serious, in the great poetic canon? Is it that we treat nursery songs as too frivolous
to anthologize?
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