A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

 

Maria Dorota

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

   And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say

   The breath goes now, 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 th' earth brings harms and fears,

   Men reckon what it did, and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love

   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

   Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,

   That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

   Though I must go, endure 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 fixed foot, makes no show

   To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,

   Yet when the other far doth roam,

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,

   And makes me end where I begun.

 John Donne

The Good-Morrow

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I 

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then? 

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly? 

Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den? 

’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be. 

If ever any beauty I did see, 

Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee. 

And now good-morrow to our waking souls, 

Which watch not one another out of fear; 

For love, all love of other sights controls, 

And makes one little room, an every where. 

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, 

Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown:

Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one. 

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, 

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest:

Where can we find two better hemispheres 

Without sharp north, without declining west? 

Whatever dies, was not mixed equally; 

If our two loves be one, or, thou and I 

Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.

John Donne