“The Canonization” by John Donne
For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or
chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,
With wealth
your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honour, or his grace,
Or the king’s real, or his stamped face
Contemplate;
what you will, approve,
So you
will let me love.
Alas, alas, who’s injured by my love?
What
merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?
When did my
colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
Litigious
men, which quarrels move,
Though
she and I do love.
Call us what you will, we are made
such by love;
Call
her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own
cost die,
And we in us find the eagle and the dove.
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes
fit.
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 tombs and
hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
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 hymns, all
shall approve
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
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!”
No comments:
Post a Comment