"Against Pleasure" Katherine Philips John O'Brien Transcription, correction, editorial commentary, and markup Staff and Research Assistants at The University of Virginia John O'Brien Sara Brunstetter National Endowment for the Humanities Literature in Context
University of Virginia Department of English P. O. Box 400121 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121 jobrien@virginia.edu lic.open.anthology@gmail.com
Published by Literature in Context under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License "Against Pleasure" Katherine Philips Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda to which is added Monsieur Corneille's Pompey & Horace, tragedies; with several other translations out of French London Printed by J.M. for H. Herringman 1667 This text is based on transcriptions created by the Early English Books Online Texts Creation Partnership, a library-based project directed by the University of Michigan and Oxford University. Their digital text was produced from the 1667 edition, published by Henry Herringman in London in 1667, three years after Philips's death, but with the collaboration of her late husband. We have also consulted The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, edited by Patrick Thomas (Essex: Stump Cross Books, 1990), which takes Philips's manuscript versions of her poems as its copytext. Annotations have been provided by faculty and students at the University of Virginia. For a full description of this object, see its ESTC entry. [36], 198, [8], 112, [2] p. : port. ; 2⁰. pp 66-68 English print London, England Dublin, Ireland

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 Unnumbered divs used. Library of Congress Name Authority File Library of Congress Classification Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Open Researcher and Contributor ID
Against Pleasure. Set by Dr. Coleman. 1. There's no such thing as pleasure here, 'Tis all a perfect cheat, Which does but shine and disappear, Whose charm is but deceit: The empty bribe of yielding souls, Which first betrays, and then controls. 2. 'Tis true, it looks at distance fair, But if we do approach, The fruit of Sodom In the biblical accont, Sodom was a city destroyed by God for the wickedness of its inhabitants (Oxford English Dictionary). will impair, And perish at a touch; It being than in fancy less, And we expect more than possess. 3. For by our pleasure we are cloy'd Cloyed refers to being made weary by something that was initially pleasureable or sweet. And so desire is done; Or else, like rivers, they make wide The channels where they run; And either way true bliss destroys, Making us narrow, or our joys. 4. We covet pleasure easily, But ne'er true bliss possess; For many things must make it be, But one may make it less. Nay, were our state as we would choose it, 'Twould be consumed by fear to lose it. 5. What art thou, then, thou wingëd air, More weak and swift than fame? Whose next successor is despair, And its attendant shame. Th' experienced prince then reason had Who said of Pleasure, — "It is mad."