By John Donne
For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsie, or my gout,
My five gray haires, or ruin’d fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with Arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honour, or his grace,
Or the kings reall, or his stamped his face
Contemplate; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.
Alas, alas, who’s injure’d by my love?
What merchant’s ships have my sighs drown’d?
Who saies my tears have overflow’d his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which may veins fill
Added one man to the plague bill?
Soldiers finde warres, and Lawyers finde out still
Litigious men, which quarrels move,
Though she and I do love.
Call us what you will, wee’are made such by love;
Call her one, me another flye,
We’are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die,
And wee in us find the Eagle and the Dove;
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us, we two being one, are it,
So, to one neuturall thing both sexes fit.
Wee dye and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
Wee can dyd by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombes or hearse
Our legend bee, it will fit for verse;
And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,
We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well wrought urne becomes
The greatest ashes, as halfe- acre tombes,
And by these hymnes, all shall approve
Us Canoniz’d for Love.
And thus invoke us; You whom reverend love
Made one another hermitage;
You, to whom love was peece, that now is rage;
Who did the whole worlds soule extract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes,
So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize,
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