| |
| MY love is of a birth as rare | |
| As ’tis, for object, strange and high; | |
| It was begotten by Despair, | |
| Upon Impossibility. | |
| |
| Magnanimous Despair alone | 5 |
| Could show me so divine a thing, | |
| Where feeble hope could ne’er have flown, | |
| But vainly flapped its tinsel wing. | |
| |
| And yet I quickly might arrive | |
| Where my extended soul is fixed; | 10 |
| But Fate does iron wedges drive, | |
| And always crowds itself betwixt. | |
| |
| For Fate with jealous eye does see | |
| Two perfect loves, nor lets them close; | |
| Their union would her ruin be, | 15 |
| And her tyrannic power depose, | |
| |
| And therefore her decrees of steel | |
| Us as the distant poles have placed, | |
| (Though Love’s whole world on us doth wheel), | |
| Not by themselves to be embraced, | 20 |
| |
| Unless the giddy heaven fall, | |
| And earth some new convulsion tear, | |
| And, us to join, the world should all | |
| Be cramped into a planisphere. | |
| |
| As lines, so love’s oblique, may well | 25 |
| Themselves in every angle greet: | |
| But ours, so truly parallel, | |
| Though infinite, can never meet. | |
| |
| Therefore the love which us doth bind, | |
| But Fate so enviously debars, | 30 |
| Is the conjunction of the mind, | |
| And opposition of the stars. | |
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