John Donne - Delphi Poets Series (27 page)

LOOK to me, faith, and look to my faith, God;
For both my centres feel this period.
Of weight one centre, one of greatness is;
And reason is that centre, faith is this;
For into our reason flow, and there do end,
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All that this natural world doth comprehend,
Quotidian things, and equidistant hence,
Shut in, for man,  in one circumference.

But for th’ enormous greatnesses, which are
So disproportion’d and so angular,
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As is God’s essence, place, and providence,
Where, how, when, what souls do, departed hence,
These things (eccentric else) on faith do strike;
Yet neither all, nor upon all, alike.
For reason, put to her best extension,
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Almost meets faith, and makes both centres one.
And nothing ever came so near to this,
As contemplation of that prince  we miss.

For all that faith might credit  mankind could,
Reason still seconded that this prince would.
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If, then, least moving  of the centre make,
More than if whole hell belch’d, the world to shake,
What must this do, centres distracted so,
That we see not what to believe or know?
Was it not well believed till now, that he,
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Whose reputation was an ecstasy
On neighbour states, which knew not why to wake,
Till he discover’d what ways he would take;
For whom, what princes angled, when they tried,
Met a torpedo, and were stupefied;
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And others’ studies, how he would be bent,
Was his great father’s greatest instrument,
And activest spirit, to convey and tie
This soul of peace through Christianity?

Was it not well believed, that he would make
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This general peace th’ eternal overtake,
And that his times might have stretch’d out so far,
As to touch those of which they emblems are?
For to confirm this just belief, that now
The last days came, we saw heaven did allow
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That, but from his aspect and exercise,
In peaceful times rumours of wars did rise.

But now this faith is heresy; we must
Still stay, and vex our great-grandmother, Dust.
O, is God prodigal? hath He spent His store
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Of plagues on us; and only now, when more
Would ease us much, doth He grudge misery,
And will not let ’s enjoy our curse—to die?
As for the earth thrown lowest down of all,
’Twere an ambition to desire to fall,
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So God, in our desire to die, doth know
Our plot for ease, in being wretched so.
Therefore we live; though such a life we have,
As but so many mandrakes on his grave.
What had his growth and generation done,
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When, what we are, his putrefaction
Sustains in us, earth, which griefs animate?
Nor hath our world now other soul than that;
And could grief get so high as heaven, that choir,
Forgetting this their new joy, would desire
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—With grief to see him—he had stay’d below,
To rectify our errors they foreknow.
Is the other centre, reason, faster then?
Where should we look for that, now we’re not men?
For if our reason be our connection
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Of causes,  now to us there can be none.

For, as if all the substances were spent,
’Twere madness to enquire of accident,
So is ’t to look for reason, he being gone,
The only subject reason wrought upon.
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If fate have such a chain, whose divers links
Industrious man discerneth, as he thinks,
When miracle doth come, and so steal in
A new link, man knows not where to begin.
At a much deader fault must reason be,
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Death having broke off such a link as he.
But now, for us, with busy proof  to come,
That we’ve no reason, would prove we had some.
So would just lamentations; therefore we
May safelier say, that we are dead, than he;
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So, if our griefs we do not well declare,
We’ve double excuse; he is not dead, and  we are.

Yet I would not  die yet; for though I be
Too narrow to think him, as he is he
—Our souls best baiting and mid-period,
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In her long journey, of considering God—
Yet, no dishonour, I can reach him thus,
As he embraced the fires of love, with us.
O may I, since I live, but see or hear
That she-intelligence which moved this sphere,
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I pardon fate, my life; whoe’er thou be,
Which hast the noble conscience, thou art she.
I conjure thee by all the charms he spoke,
By th’ oaths, which only you two never broke,
By all the souls ye sigh’d, that if you see
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These lines, you wish I knew your history;
So, much as you two mutual heavens were here,
I were an angel, singing what you were.

OBSEQUIES OF THE LORD HARRINGTON, BROTHER TO THE COUNTESS OF BEDFORD

To the Countess of BedfordMADAM,  I have learned by those laws wherein I am a  little conversant, that he which bestows any cost upon the dead, obliges him which is dead, but not the heir; I do not therefore send this paper to your Ladyship that you should thank me for it, or think that I thank you in it; your favours and benefits to me are so much above my merits, that they are even above my gratitude, if that were to be judged by words, which must express it. But, Madam, since your noble brother’s fortune being yours, the evidences also concerning it are yours; so, his virtues being yours, the evidences concerning that belong also to you, of which by your acceptance this may be one piece, in which quality I humbly present it, and as a testimony how entirely your family possesseth
Your ladyship’s most humble 
and thankful servant, 
JOHN DONNE.

FAIR  soul, which wast, not only as all souls be,
Then when thou wast infusèd, harmony,
But didst continue so; and now dost bear
A part in God’s great organ, this whole sphere;
If looking up to God, or down to us,
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Thou find that any way is pervious
’Twixt heaven and earth, and that men’s  actions do
Come to your knowledge, and affections too,
See, and with joy, me to that good degree
Of goodness grown, that I can study thee,
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And by these meditations refined,
Can unapparel and enlarge my mind,
And so can make, by this soft ecstasy,
This place a map of heaven, myself of thee.
Thou seest me here at midnight; now all rest;
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Times dead-low water, when all minds divest
To-morrow’s business; when the labourers have
Such rest in bed, that their last churchyard grave,
Subject to change, will scarce be a type of this;
Now, when the client, whose last hearing is
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To-morrow, sleeps; when the condemned man,
Who, when he opes his eyes, must shut them then
Again by death, although sad watch he keep,
Doth practice dying by a little sleep;
Thou at this midnight seest me, and as soon
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As that sun rises to me, midnight’s noon,
All the world grows transparent, and I see
Through all, both church and state, in seeing thee;
And I discern by favour of this light,
Myself, the hardest  object of the sight.  30
God is the glass; as thou, when thou dost see
Him Who sees all, seest all concerning thee;
So, yet unglorified, I comprehend
All, in these mirrors of thy ways and end.
Though God be our true glass, through which we see
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All, since the being of all things is He,
Yet are the trunks which do to us derive
Things, in proportion, fit by perspective,
Deeds of good men; for by their being here,
Virtues, indeed remote, seem to be near.
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But where can I affirm, or where arrest
My thoughts on his deeds? which shall I call best?
For fluid virtue cannot be looked on,
Nor can endure a contemplation.
As bodies change, and as I do not wear
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Those spirits, humours, blood I did last year,
And, as if on a stream I fix mine eye,
That drop, which I looked on, is presently
Push’d with more waters from my sight, and gone;
So in this sea of virtues, can no one
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Be insisted on; virtues as rivers pass,
Yet still remains that virtuous man there was.
And as if man feed on man’s flesh, and so
Part of his body to another owe,
Yet at the last two perfect bodies rise,
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Because God knows where every atom lies;
So, if one knowledge were made of all those,
Who knew his minutes well, he might dispose
His virtues into names and ranks; but I
Should injure nature, virtue, and destiny,
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Should I divide and discontinue so
Virtue, which did in one entireness grow.
For as he that should say spirits are framed
Of all the purest parts that can be named,
Honours not spirits half so much as he
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Which says they have no parts, but simple be;
So is ’t of virtue, for a point and one
Are much entirer than a million.
And had fate meant to have had his virtues told,
It would have let him live to have been old;
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So then that virtue in season, and then this,
We might have seen, and said, that now he is
Witty, now wise, now temperate, now just.
In good short lives, virtues are fain to thrust,
And to be sure betimes to get a place,
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When they would exercise, lack time and space.

So was it in this person, forced to be,
For lack of time, his own epitome;
So to exhibit in few years as much
As all the long-breathed chronicles can touch.
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As when an angel down from heaven doth fly,
Our quick thought cannot keep him company;
We cannot think, ‘Now he is at the sun,
Now through the moon, now he through th’ air doth run’;
Yet when he’s come, we know he did repair
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To all ’twixt heaven and earth, sun, moon, and air.
And as this angel in an instant knows,
And yet we know, this sudden knowledge grows
By quick amassing several forms of things,
Which he successively to order brings,
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When they, whose slow-paced lame thoughts cannot go
So fast as he, think that he doth not so.
Just as a perfect reader doth not dwell
On every syllable, nor stay to spell,
Yet without doubt he doth distinctly see,
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And lay together every A and B;
So, in short-lived good men, is not understood
Each several virtue, but the compound good;
For they all virtue’s paths in that pace tread,
As angels go, and know, and as men read.
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O, why should then these men, these lumps of balm,
Sent hither the world’s tempest to becalm,
Before by deeds they are diffused and spread,
And so make us alive, themselves be dead?
O soul, O circle, why so quickly be
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Thy ends, thy birth and death closed up in thee?
Since one foot of thy compass still was placed
In heaven, the other might securely have paced,
In the most large extent, through every path
Which the whole world or man th’ abridgment hath.
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Thou know’st that though the tropic circles have
—Yea, and those small ones which the Poles engrave—
All the same roundness, evenness, and all
The endlessness of th’ equinoctial;
Yet, when we come to measure distances,
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How here, how there, the sun affected is,
When he doth faintly work, and when prevail,
Only great circles, then, can be our scale.
So though thy circle to thyself express
All, tending to thy endless happiness,
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And we by our good use of it may try,
Both how to live well, young, and how to die;
Yet since we must be old, and age endures
His torrid zone at court, and calentures
Of hot ambitions, irreligion’s ice,
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Zeal’s agues, and hydroptic avarice
—Infirmities, which need the scale of truth,
As well as lust and ignorance of youth—
Why didst thou not for these give medicines too,
And by thy doing set us  what to do?  130
Though as small pocket-clocks, whose every wheel
Doth each mismotion and distemper feel,
Whose hands get shaking palsies, and whose string
(His sinews) slackens, and whose soul, the spring,
Expires, or languishes; whose pulse, the fly,   135
Either beats not, or beats unevenly;
Whose voice, the bell, doth rattle or grow dumb,
Or idle as men which to their last hours are come,
If these clocks be not wound, or be wound still,
Or be not set, or set at every will;
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So youth is easiest to destruction,
If then we follow all, or follow none.
Yet, as in great clocks which in steeples chime,
Placed to inform whole towns to employ their time,
An error doth more harm, being general,
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When small clocks’ faults only on the wearer fall;
So work the faults of age, on which the eye
Of children, servants, or the state rely.
Why wouldst not thou, then, which hadst such a soul,
A clock so true, as might the sun control,
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And daily hadst from Him, who gave it thee,
Instructions, such as it could never be
Disorder’d, stay here, as a general
And great sun-dial, to have set us all?
O, why wouldest thou be an instrument
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To this unnatural course, or why consent
To this, not miracle, but prodigy,
That when the ebbs longer than flowings be,
Virtue, whose flood did with thy youth begin,
Should so much faster ebb out, than flow in?
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Though her flood were blown in by thy first breath,
All is at once sunk in the whirlpool death.
Which word I would not name, but that I see
Death, else a desert, grown a court by thee.
Now I am sure that if a man would have
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Good company, his entry is a grave.
Methinks all cities, now, but anthills be,
Where, when the several labourers I see,
For children, house, provision taking pain,
They’re all but ants, carrying eggs, straw, and grain.
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And churchyards are our cities, unto which
The most repair, that are in goodness rich.
There is the best concourse and confluence,
There are the holy suburbs, and from thence
Begins God’s city, New Jerusalem,
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Which doth extend her utmost gates to them.
At that gate, then, triumphant soul, dost thou
Begin thy triumph. But since laws allow,
That at the triumph day the people may
All that they will ’gainst the triumpher say,
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Let me here use that freedom, and express
My grief, though not to make thy triumph less.
By law to triumphs none admitted be,
Till they as magistrates get victory.
Though then to thy force all youth’s foes did yield,
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Yet till fit time had wrought thee to that field,
To which thy rank in this state destined thee,
That there thy counsels might get victory,
And so in that capacity remove
All jealousies ’twixt prince and subjects’ love,
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Thou couldst no title to this triumph have;
Thou didst intrude on death, usurp  a grave.