| |
| SIR, more than kisses, letters mingle souls, | |
| For thus, friends absent speak. This ease controls | |
| The tediousness of my life; but for these | |
| I could ideate nothing which could please; 1 | |
| But I should wither in one day, and pass | 5 |
| To a bottle of hay, that am a lock of grass. 2 | |
| Life is a voyage, and in our lives’ ways | |
| Countries, courts, towns are rocks, or remoras; | |
| They break or stop all ships, yet our state’s such, | |
| That though than pitch they stain worse, we must touch. | 10 |
| If in the furnace of the raging line, 3 | |
| Or under th’ adverse icy pole thou pine, | |
| Thou know’st two temperate regions, girded in, | |
| Dwell there; but O, what refuge canst thou win | |
| Parch’d in the court, and in the country frozen? | 15 |
| Shall cities built of both extremes be chosen? | |
| Can dung or garlic be perfume? 4 Or can | |
| A scorpion or torpedo cure a man? | |
| Cities are worst of all three; of all three? | |
| O knotty riddle! each is worst equally. | 20 |
| Cities are sepulchres; they who dwell there | |
| Are carcases, as if none such there 5 were. | |
| And courts are theatres, where some men play | |
| Princes, some slaves, all to one end, of one clay. 6 | |
| The country is a desert, where the good, | 25 |
| Gain’d, inhabits not, born, is not understood. 7 | |
| There men become beasts, and prone to all evils; 8 | |
| In cities blocks, and in a lewd court devils. | |
| As in the first chaos, confusedly, | |
| Each element’s qualities were in th’ other three, | 30 |
| So pride, lust, covetise, being several | |
| To these three places, yet all are in all, | |
| And mingled thus, their issue is 9 incestuous. | |
| Falsehood is denizen’d; virtue is barbarous. | |
| Let no man say there, “Virtue’s flinty wall | 35 |
| Shall lock vice in me, I’ll do none, but know all.” | |
| Men are sponges, which, to pour out, receive; | |
| Who know false play, rather than lose, deceive. | |
| For in best understandings sin began, | |
| Angels sinn’d first, then devils, and then man. | 40 |
| Only perchance beasts sin not; wretched we | |
| Are beasts in all but white integrity. | |
| I think if men, which in these places live, | |
| Durst look in themselves, and themselves retrieve, | |
| They would like strangers greet themselves, seeing then | 45 |
| Utopian youth grown old Italian. | |
| Be then thine own home, and in thyself dwell; | |
| Inn anywhere; continuance maketh hell. | |
| And seeing the snail, which everywhere doth roam, | |
| Carrying his own house still, still is at home; | 50 |
| Follow—for he is easy paced—this snail, | |
| Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy gaol. | |
| And in the world’s sea do not like cork sleep | |
| Upon the water’s face; nor in the deep | |
| Sink like a lead without a line; but as | 55 |
| Fishes glide, leaving no print where they pass, | |
| Nor making sound; so closely thy course go, | |
| Let men dispute, whether thou breathe or no. | |
| Only in this be no Galenist 10—to make | |
| Courts’ hot ambitions wholesome, do not take | 60 |
| A dram of country’s dullness; do not add | |
| Correctives, but, as chemics, purge the bad. | |
| But, sir, I advise not you, I rather do | |
| Say o’er those lessons, which I learn’d of you; | |
| Whom, free from Germany’s schisms, and lightness | 65 |
| Of France, and fair Italy’s faithlessness, | |
| Having from these suck’d all they had of worth, | |
| And brought home that faith which you carried forth, | |
| I thoroughly love; but if myself I’ve won | |
| To know my rules, I have, and you have DONNE. | 70 |
