DEFINE my weal and tell the joys of Heaven,
Express my woes and show the pains of Hell,
Declare what fate unlucky stars have given,
And ask a world upon my life to dwell;
Make known the faith that Fortune could not move,
Compare my worth with others' base desert,
Let virtue be the touchstone of my love,
So may the heavens read wonders in my heart;
Behold the clouds which have eclipsed my sun,
And view the crosses which my course do let,
Tell me if ever since the world begun
So fair a rising had so foul a set :
And see if Time, if he would strive to prove,
Can show a second to so pure a love.
SINCE there's no help, come let us kiss and part,
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain ;
Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover.
WHEN first I ended, then I first began,
Then more I travelled, further from my rest,
Where most I lost there most of all I won,
Pinéd with hunger rising from a feast.
Methinks I fly, yet want I legs to go,
Wise in conceit, in act a very sot,
Ravished with joy amidst a hell of woe,
What most I seem that surest am I not.
I build my hopes a world above the sky,
Yet with the mole I creep into the earth;
In plenty I am starved with penury,
And yet I surfeit in the greatest dearth:
I have, I want, despair, and yet desire,
Burned in a sea of ice, drowned 'midst a fire.
TRUCE, gentle love, a parley now I crave,
Methinks 'tis long since first these wars begun,
Nor thou, nor I, the better yet can have,
Bad is the match where neither party won.
I offer free conditions of fair peace,
My heart for hostage that it shall remain,
Discharge our forces, here let malice cease,
So for my pledge thou give me pledge again;
Or if nothing but death will serve thy turn,
Still thirsting for subversion of my state,
Do what thou canst, raze, massacre, and burn,
Let the world see the utmost of thy hate;
I send defiance, since, if overthrown,
Thou vanquishing, the conquest is mine own.
THAT ten-years-travelled Greek returned from sea Ne'er joyed so much to see his Ithaca
As I should you, who are alone to me
More than wide Greece could to that wanderer be.
The winter winds still easterly do keep,
And with keen frosts have chainéd up the deep;
The sun's to us a niggard of his rays,
But revelleth with our Antipodes ;
And seldom to us when he shows his head,
Muffled in vapours he straight hies to bed.
In those bleak mountains can you live, where snow
Maketh the vales up to the hills to grow;
Whereas men's breaths do instantly congeal
And atomed mists turn instantly to hail;
Belike you think, from this more temperate coast
My sighs may have the power to thaw the frost,
Which I from hence should swiftly send you thither,
Yet not so swift as you come slowly hither.
How many a time hath Phoebe from her wane
With Phoebus' fires filled up her horns again;
She through her orb still on her course doth range,
But you keep yours still, nor for me will change;
The sun that mounted the stern Lion's back,
Shall with the Fishes shortly dive the brack,
But still you keep your station which confines
You, nor regard him travelling the signs.
Those ships which when you went put out to sea,
Both to our Greenland and Virginia,
Are now returned, and customed have their fraught,
Yet you arrive not, nor return me aught.
The Thames was not so frozen yet this year
As is my bosom, with the chilly fear
Of your not coming, which on me doth light
As on those climes where half the world is night.
Of every tedious hour you have made two
All this long winter here, by missing you:
Minutes are months, and when the hour is past
A year is ended since the clock struck last,
When your remembrance puts me on the rack,
And I should swoon to see an Almanack,
To read what silent weeks away are slid
Since the dire Fates you from my sight have hid.
I hate him who the first deviser was
Of this same foolish thing, the hour-glass,
And of the watch whose dribbling sands and wheel,
With their slow strokes, make me too much to feel
Your slackness hither. O how I do ban
Him that these dials against walls began,
Whose snaily motion of the moving hand,
Although it go, yet seem to me to stand;
As though at Adam it had first set out,
And had been stealing all this while about,
And when it back to the first point should come,
It shall be then just at the general doom.
The seas into themselves retract their flows, The changing wind from every quarter blows, Declining winter in the spring doth call, The stars rise to us as from us they fall; Those birds we see that leave us in the prime Again in autumn re-salute our clime. Sure, either Nature you from kind hath made, Or you delight else to be retrograde.
But I perceive, by your attractive powers, Like an enchantress you have charmed the hours Into short minutes, and have drawn them back, So that of us at London you do lack Almost a year; the spring is scarce begun There where you live, and autumn almost done With us more eastward; surely you devise, By your strong magic, that the sun shall rise Where now it sets, and that in some few years You'll alter quite the motion of the spheres.
Yes, and you mean I shall complain my love To gravelled walks or to a stupid grove, Now your companions; and that you the while, As you are cruel, will sit by and smile, To make me write to these, while passers-by Slightly look in your lovely face where I
See beauty's heaven, whilst silly blockheads they,
Like laden asses, plod upon their way
And wonder not, as you should point a clown
Up to the Guards, or Ariadne's crown
Of constellations, and his dulness tell,
He'd think your words were certainly a spell;
Or him some piece from Crete or Marcus show,
In all his life which till that time ne'er saw
Painting except, in alehouse or old Hall
Done by some druzzler, of the Prodigal.
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