THE BROKEN HEART.

He is stark mad whoever says

That he hath been in love an hour;
Yet not that love so soon decays,

But that it can in ten less space devour.

Who will believe me if I swear

That I have had the plague a year?

Who would not laugh at me, if I should say
I saw a flash of powder burn a day?

Ah! what a trifle is a heart

If once into Love's hands it come?

All other griefs allow a part

To other griefs, and ask themselves but some:
They come to us, but us Love draws,

He swallows us and never chaws:

By him, as by chain'd shot, whole ranks do die;
He is the tyrant pike, and we the fry.

If 't were not so, what did become

Of my heart when I first saw thee?

I brought a heart into the room,

But from the room I carried none with me:
If it had gone to thee, I know

Mine would have taught thine heart to show
More pity unto me; but Love, alas!

At one first blow did shiver it as glass.

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Yet nothing can to nothing fall,

Nor any place be empty quite,

Therefore I think my breast hath all

Those pieces still, tho' they do not unite:
And now as broken glasses show

A hundred lesser faces, so

My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore,
But after one such love can love no more.

A VALEDICTION,

FORBIDDING MOURNING.

As virtuous men pass mildly' away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
Now his breath goes, and some say No:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move,
'Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

Tho' greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Of absence, 'cause it doth remove The thing which elemented it.

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But we by' a love so far refin'd,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,

Careless eyes, lips, and hands, to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Tho' I must go, indure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth if th' other do.

And tho' it in the centre sit,

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WHE

THE ECSTACY.

HERE, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swell'd up, to rest

The violet's declining head,

Sate we on one another's breast

Our hands were firmly cemented

By a fast balm, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string:

So to engraft our hands as yet
Was all the means to make us one,

And pictures in our eyes to get

Was all our propagation.

As 'twixt two equal armies Fate
Suspends uncertain victory,

Our souls (which, to advance our state,
Were gone out) hung 'twixt her and me:

And, whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay,
All day the same our postures were,
And we said nothing all the day,

If any so by love refin'd

That he souls' language understood,'
And by good love were grown all mind,
Within convenient distance stood,

He (tho' he knew not which soul spake,
Because both meant, both spake, the same)
Might thence a new concoction take,

And part far purer than he came.

Donne

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This Ecstacy doth unperplex

(We said) and tell us what we lave;
We see by this it was not sex,
We see, we saw not what did move;

But as all several souls contain
Mixture of things they know not what,
Love these mix'd souls doth mix again,
And makes both one, each this and that.

A single violet transplant,

The strength, the colour, and the size, (All which before was poor and scant) Redoubles still and multiplies.

When love with one another sa
Inter-animates two souls,

That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loveliness controuls.

We then, who are this new soul, know
Of what we are compos'd and made;
For the atoms, of which we grow,

Are soul, whom no change can invade.

But, O, alas! so long, so far,

Our bodies why do we forbear?

They are ours, tho' not we; we are
Th' intelligences, they the spheres.

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