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| LOVE, any devil else but you | |
| Would for a given soul give something too. | |
| At court your fellows every day | |
| Give th’ art of rhyming, huntsmanship, or play, | |
| For them which were their own before; | 5 |
| Only I have nothing, which gave more, | |
| But am, alas! by being lowly, lower. | |
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| I ask no dispensation now, | |
| To falsify a tear, or sigh, or vow; 1 | |
| I do not sue from thee to draw | 10 |
| A non obstante on nature’s law; | |
| These are prerogatives, they inhere | |
| In thee and thine; none should forswear | |
| Except that he Love’s minion were. | |
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| Give me thy weakness, make me blind, | 15 |
| Both ways, as thou and thine, in eyes and mind; | |
| Love, let me never know that this | |
| Is love, or, that love childish is; | |
| Let me not know that others know | |
| That she knows my pains, lest that so | 20 |
| A tender shame make me mine own new woe. | |
| |
| If thou give nothing, yet thou ’rt just, | |
| Because I would not thy first motions trust; | |
| Small towns which stand stiff, till great shot | |
| Enforce them, by war’s law condition not; | 25 |
| Such in Love’s warfare is my case; | |
| I may not article for grace, | |
| Having put Love at last to show this face. 2 | |
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| This face, by which he could command | |
| And change th’ idolatry of any land, | 30 |
| This face, which, wheresoe’er it comes, | |
| Can call vow’d men from cloisters, dead from tombs, | |
| And melt both poles at once, and store | |
| Deserts with cities, and make more | |
| Mines in the earth, than quarries were before. | 35 |
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| For this Love is enraged with me, | |
| Yet kills not; if I must example be | |
| To future rebels, if th’ unborn | |
| Must learn by my being cut up and torn, | |
| Kill, and dissect me, Love; for this | 40 |
| Torture against thine own end is; | |
| Rack’d carcasses make ill anatomies. | |
