John Donne - Delphi Poets Series (6 page)

Whate’er she meant by it, bury it with me,
     For since I am
Love’s martyr, it might breed idolatry,
If into other hands these relics came.
     As ‘twas humility
To afford to it all that a soul can do,
     So ‘tis some bravery,
That since you would have none of me, I bury some of you.

THE BLOSSOM.

    LITTLE think’st thou, poor flower,
    Whom I’ve watch’d six or seven days,
And seen thy birth, and seen what every hour
Gave to thy growth, thee to this height to raise,
And now dost laugh and triumph on this bough,
    Little think’st thou,
That it will freeze anon, and that I shall
To-morrow find thee fallen, or not at all.

    Little think’st thou, poor heart,
    That labourest yet to nestle thee,
And think’st by hovering here to get a part
In a forbidden or forbidding tree,
And hopest her stiffness by long siege to bow,
    Little think’st thou
That thou to-morrow, ere the sun doth wake,
Must with the sun and me a journey take.

    But thou, which lovest to be
    Subtle to plague thyself, wilt say,
Alas! if you must go, what’s that to me?
Here lies my business, and here I will stay
You go to friends, whose love and means present
    Various content
To your eyes, ears, and taste, and every part;
If then your body go, what need your heart?

    Well then, stay here; but know,
    When thou hast stay’d and done thy most,
A naked thinking heart, that makes no show,
Is to a woman but a kind of ghost.
How shall she know my heart; or having none,
    Know thee for one?
Practice may make her know some other part;
But take my word, she doth not know a heart.

    Meet me in London, then,
    Twenty days hence, and thou shalt see
Me fresher and more fat, by being with men,
Than if I had stay’d still with her and thee.
For God’s sake, if you can, be you so too;
    I will give you
There to another friend, whom we shall find
As glad to have my body as my mind.

THE PRIMROSE

BEING AT MONTGOMERY CASTLE UPON THE HILL, ON WHICH IT IS SITUATE.

       UPON this Primrose hill,
       Where, if heaven would distil
A shower of rain, each several drop might go
To his own primrose, and grow manna so;
And where their form, and their infinity
       Make a terrestrial galaxy,
       As the small stars do in the sky;
I walk to find a true love; and I see
That ‘tis not a mere woman, that is she,
But must or more or less than woman be.

       Yet know I not, which flower
       I wish; a six, or four;
For should my true-love less than woman be,
She were scarce anything; and then, should she
Be more than woman, she would get above
       All thought of sex, and think to move
       My heart to study her, and not to love.
Both these were monsters; since there must reside
Falsehood in woman, I could more abide,
She were by art, than nature falsified.

       Live, primrose, then, and thrive
       With thy true number five;
And, woman, whom this flower doth represent,
With this mysterious number be content;
Ten is the farthest number; if half ten
       Belongs to each woman, then
       Each woman may take half us men;
Or — if this will not serve their turn — since all
Numbers are odd, or even, and they fall
First into five, women may take us all.

THE RELIC.

       WHEN my grave is broke up again
       Some second guest to entertain,
       — For graves have learn’d that woman-head,
       To be to more than one a bed —
      And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
      Will he not let us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their souls at the last busy day
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?

       If this fall in a time, or land,
       Where mass-devotion doth command,
       Then he that digs us up will bring
       Us to the bishop or the king,
      To make us relics; then
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
      A something else thereby;
All women shall adore us, and some men.
And, since at such time miracles are sought,
I would have that age by this paper taught
What miracles we harmless lovers wrought.

       First we loved well and faithfully,
       Yet knew not what we loved, nor why;
       Difference of sex we never knew,
       No more than guardian angels do;
      Coming and going we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
      Our hands ne’er touch’d the seals,
Which nature, injured by late law, sets free.
These miracles we did; but now alas!
All measure, and all language, I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.

THE DAMP.

WHEN I am dead, and doctors know not why,
       And my friends’ curiosity
Will have me cut up to survey each part,
When they shall find your picture in my heart,
       You think a sudden damp of love
       Will thorough all their senses move,
And work on them as me, and so prefer
Your murder to the name of massacre,

Poor victories; but if you dare be brave,
       And pleasure in your conquest have,
First kill th’ enormous giant, your Disdain;
And let th’ enchantress Honour, next be slain;
       And like a Goth and Vandal rise,
       Deface records and histories
Of your own arts and triumphs over men,
And without such advantage kill me then,

For I could muster up, as well as you,
       My giants, and my witches too,
Which are vast Constancy and Secretness;
But these I neither look for nor profess;
       Kill me as woman, let me die
       As a mere man; do you but try
Your passive valour, and you shall find then,
Naked you have odds enough of any man.

THE DISSOLUTION.

    SHE’s dead; and all which die
   To their first elements resolve;
And we were mutual elements to us,
   And made of one another.
    My body then doth hers involve,
And those things whereof I consist hereby
In me abundant grow, and burdenous,
   And nourish not, but smother.
    My fire of passion, sighs of air,
Water of tears, and earthly sad despair,
       Which my materials be,
But near worn out by love’s security,
She, to my loss, doth by her death repair.
And I might live long wretched so,
But that my fire doth with my fuel grow.
   Now, as those active kings
    Whose foreign conquest treasure brings,
Receive more, and spend more, and soonest break,
This — which I am amazed that I can speak —
   This death, hath with my store
       My use increased.
And so my soul, more earnestly released,
Will outstrip hers; as bullets flown before
A latter bullet may o’ertake, the powder being more.

A JET RING SENT.

THOU art not so black as my heart,
    Nor half so brittle as her heart, thou art;
What would’st thou say? shall both our properties by thee be spoke,
    — Nothing more endless, nothing sooner broke?

       Marriage rings are not of this stuff;
    Oh, why should ought less precious, or less tough
Figure our loves? except in thy name thou have bid it say,
    “ — I’m cheap, and nought but fashion; fling me away.”

       Yet stay with me since thou art come,
    Circle this finger’s top, which didst her thumb;
Be justly proud, and gladly safe, that thou dost dwell with me;
She that, O! broke her faith, would soon break thee.

NEGATIVE LOVE.

I NEVER stoop’d so low, as they
Which on an eye, cheek, lip, can prey;
    Seldom to them which soar no higher
    Than virtue, or the mind to admire.
For sense and understanding may
    Know what gives fuel to their fire;
My love, though silly, is more brave;
For may I miss, whene’er I crave,
If I know yet what I would have.

If that be simply perfectest,
Which can by no way be express’d
    But negatives, my love is so.
    To all, which all love, I say no.
If any who deciphers best,
    What we know not — ourselves — can know,
Let him teach me that nothing. This
As yet my ease and comfort is,
Though I speed not, I cannot miss.

THE PROHIBITION.

       TAKE heed of loving me;
At least remember, I forbade it thee;
Not that I shall repair my unthrifty waste
Of breath and blood, upon thy sighs and tears,
By being to thee then what to me thou wast;
But so great joy our life at once outwears.
Then, lest thy love by my death frustrate be,
If thou love me, take heed of loving me.

       Take heed of hating me,
Or too much triumph in the victory;
Not that I shall be mine own officer,
And hate with hate again retaliate;
But thou wilt lose the style of conqueror,
If I, thy conquest, perish by thy hate.
Then, lest my being nothing lessen thee,
If thou hate me, take heed of hating me.

       Yet love and hate me too;
So these extremes shall ne’er their office do;
Love me, that I may die the gentler way;
Hate me, because thy love’s too great for me;
Or let these two, themselves, not me, decay;
So shall I live thy stage, not triumph be.
Lest thou thy love and hate, and me undo,
O let me live, yet love and hate me too.

THE EXPIRATION.

SO, so, break off this last lamenting kiss,
    Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away;
Turn, thou ghost, that way, and let me turn this,
    And let ourselves benight our happiest day.
We ask none leave to love; nor will we owe
    Any so cheap a death as saying, “Go.”

Go; and if that word have not quite killed thee,
    Ease me with death, by bidding me go too.
Or, if it have, let my word work on me,
    And a just office on a murderer do.
Except it be too late, to kill me so,
    Being double dead, going, and bidding, “Go.”

THE COMPUTATION.

FOR my first twenty years, since yesterday,
    I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away;
For forty more I fed on favours past,
    And forty on hopes that thou wouldst they might last;
Tears drown’d one hundred, and sighs blew out two;
    A thousand, I did neither think nor do,
Or not divide, all being one thought of you;
    Or in a thousand more, forgot that too.
Yet call not this long life; but think that I
Am, by being dead, immortal; can ghosts die?

THE PARADOX.

NO lover saith, I love, nor any other
       Can judge a perfect lover;
He thinks that else none can or will agree,
       That any loves but he;
I cannot say I loved, for who can say
       He was kill’d yesterday.
Love with excess of heat, more young than old,
       Death kills with too much cold;
We die but once, and who loved last did die,
       He that saith, twice, doth lie;
For though he seem to move, and stir a while,
       It doth the sense beguile.
Such life is like the light which bideth yet
       When the life’s light is set,
Or like the heat which fire in solid matter
       Leaves behind, two hours after.
Once I loved and died; and am now become
       Mine epitaph and tomb;
Here dead men speak their last, and so do I;
       Love-slain, lo! here I die.

SOUL’S JOY, NOW I AM GONE.

SOUL’S joy, now I am gone,
    And you alone,
    — Which cannot be,
Since I must leave myself with thee,
  And carry thee with me —
  Yet when unto our eyes
    Absence denies
    Each other’s sight,
And makes to us a constant night,
    When others change to light;
    
O give no way to grief,
    But let belief
        Of mutual love
    This wonder to the vulgar prove,
        Our bodies, not we move.

Let not thy wit beweep
    Words but sense deep;
    For when we miss
By distance our hope’s joining bliss,
  Even then our souls shall kiss;
  Fools have no means to meet,
    But by their feet;
    Why should our clay
Over our spirits so much sway,
    To tie us to that way?
    
O give no way to grief, &c.

FAREWELL TO LOVE.

      WHILST yet to prove
I thought there was some deity in love,
    So did I reverence, and gave
Worship; as atheists at their dying hour
Call, what they cannot name, an unknown power,
    As ignorantly did I crave.
          Thus when
Things not yet known are coveted by men,
    Our desires give them fashion, and so
As they wax lesser, fall, as they size, grow.

      But, from late fair,
His highness sitting in a golden chair,
    Is not less cared for after three days
By children, than the thing which lovers so
Blindly admire, and with such worship woo;
    Being had, enjoying it decays;
         And thence,
What before pleased them all, takes but one sense,
And that so lamely, as it leaves behind
A kind of sorrowing dulness to the mind.

      Ah cannot we,
As well as cocks and lions, jocund be
    After such pleasures, unless wise
Nature decreed — since each such act, they say,
Diminisheth the length of life a day —
    This; as she would man should despise
          The sport,
Because that other curse of being short,
    And only for a minute made to be
Eager, desires to raise posterity.

      Since so, my mind
Shall not desire what no man else can find;
    I’ll no more dote and run
To pursue things which had endamaged me;
And when I come where moving beauties be,
    As men do when the summer’s sun
          Grows great,
Though I admire their greatness, shun their heat.
    Each place can afford shadows; if all fail,
‘Tis but applying worm-seed to the tail.

A LECTURE UPON THE SHADOW.

STAND still, and I will read to thee
A lecture, Love, in Love’s philosophy.
    These three hours that we have spent,
    Walking here, two shadows went
Along with us, which we ourselves produced.
But, now the sun is just above our head,
    We do those shadows tread,
    And to brave clearness all things are reduced.
So whilst our infant loves did grow,
Disguises did, and shadows, flow
From us and our cares; but now ‘tis not so.