John Donne - Delphi Poets Series Read Online Free PDF

mad, whoever says,
    That he hath been in love an hour,
Yet not that love so soon decays,
    But that it can ten in 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, our hearts the fry.
    If ‘twere 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.
    Yet nothing can to nothing fall,
    Nor any place be empty quite;
Therefore I think my breast hath all
    Those pieces still, though they be 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,     5
    No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys 
    To tell the laity our love. 
    Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears;
    Men reckon what it did, and meant;  10
But trepidation of the spheres, 
    Though greater far, is innocent. 
    Dull sublunary lovers’ love 
    — Whose soul is sense — cannot admit 
Of absence, ‘cause it doth remove  15
    The thing which elemented it. 
    But we by a love so much refined,
    That ourselves know not what it is, 
Inter-assurèd of the mind, 
    Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.      20
    Our two souls therefore, which are one, 
    Though I must go, endure not yet 
A breach, but an expansion, 
    Like gold to aery thinness beat. 
    If they be two, they are two so25
    As stiff twin compasses are two; 
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show 
    To move, but doth, if th’ other do. 
    And though it in the centre sit, 
    Yet, when the other far doth roam,     30
It leans, and hearkens after it, 
    And grows erect, as that comes home. 
    Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
    Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
    And makes me end where I begun. 

THE ECSTACY.
    WHERE, like a pillow on a bed,
    A pregnant bank swell’d up, to rest
The violet’s reclining head,
    Sat we two, one another’s best.
    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 their 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 refined,
    That he soul’s language understood,
And by good love were grown all mind,
    Within convenient distance stood,
    He — though 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.
    This ecstasy doth