THE RELIC WHEN my grave is broke up again A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, And think that there a loving couple lies, To make their souls at the last busy day If this fall in a time or land Where mass-devotion doth command, 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. First we loved well and faithfully, Yet knew not what we loved, nor why ; Than our guardian angels do; Coming and going we Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals; Which nature, injured by late law, sets free.9 All measure, and all language, I should pass, 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 or Vandal rise, Deface recòrds and histories Of your own arts and triumphs over men, 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. A NOCTURNAL UPON ST. LUCY'S DAY BEING THE SHORTEST DAY 'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's, The world's whole sap is sunk ; The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk, Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh, Study me then, you who shall lovers be At the next world, that is, at the next spring; In whom Love wrought new alchemy. A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness; Of absence, darkness, death - things which are not. All others, from all things, draw all that's good, |