| |
| FOR God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love; | |
| Or chide my palsy, or my gout; | |
| My five grey hairs, or ruin’d fortune 1 flout; | |
| With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve; | |
| Take you a course, get you a place, | 5 |
| Observe his Honour, or his Grace; | |
| Or the king’s real, or his stamp’d face | |
| Contemplate; what you will, approve, | |
| So you will let me love. | |
| |
| Alas! alas! who’s injured by my love? | 10 |
| What merchant’s ships have my sighs drown’d? | |
| Who says my tears have overflow’d his ground? | |
| When did my colds a forward spring remove? | |
| When did the heats which my veins 2 fill | |
| Add one more 3 to the plaguy bill? | 15 |
| Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still | |
| Litigious men, which 4 quarrels move, | |
| Though 5 she and I do love. | |
| |
| Call’s what you will, we are made such by love; | |
| Call her one, me another fly, | 20 |
| We’re tapers too, and at our own cost die, | |
| And we in us find th’ eagle and the dove. | |
| The phœnix riddle hath more wit | |
| By us; we two being one, are it; | |
| So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit. | 25 |
| We die and rise the same, and prove | |
| Mysterious by this love. | |
| |
| We can die by it, if not live by love, | |
| And if unfit for tomb or 6 hearse | |
| Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; | 30 |
| And if no piece of chronicle we prove, | |
| We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms; | |
| As well a well-wrought urn becomes | |
| The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs, | |
| And by these 7 hymns all shall approve | 35 |
| Us canonized for love; | |
| |
| And thus invoke us, “You, whom reverend love | |
| Made one another’s hermitage; | |
| You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage; | |
| Who did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove | 40 |
| Into the glasses of your eyes; | |
| So made such mirrors, and such spies, | |
| That they did all to you epitomize— | |
| Countries, towns, courts beg from above | |
| A pattern of your love.” 8 | 45 |
