For God's sake hold
your tongue, and let me love,
Or
chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or
ruined fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honor, or his grace,
Or the king's real, or
his stampèd face
Contemplate;
what you will, approve,
So
you will let me love.
Alas, alas, who's
injured by my love?
What
merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?
Who says my tears have
overflowed his ground?
When did my colds a forward spring remove?
When did the heats which my veins fill
Add one more to the plaguy bill?
Soldiers find wars,
and lawyers find out still
Litigious
men, which quarrels move,
Though
she and I do love.
Call us what you will,
we are made such by love;
Call
her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and
at our own cost die,
And we in us find the eagle and the dove.
The phœnix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral
thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
We can die by it, if
not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will
be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as
half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for Love.
And thus invoke us:
"You, whom reverend love
Made one another's hermitage;
You, to whom love was
peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to
you epitomize)
Countries, towns, courts: beg from above
A pattern of your love!"
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