| FOR God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love ; | |
| Or chide my palsy, or my gout ; | |
| My five gray hairs, or ruin'd fortune flout ; | |
| With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve ; | |
| Take you a course, get you a place, | 5 |
| Observe his Honour, or his Grace ; | |
| Or the king's real, or his stamp'd face | |
| Contemplate ; what you will, approve, | |
| So you will let me love. | |
| |
| Alas ! alas ! who's injured by my love? | 10 |
| What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd? | |
| Who says my tears have overflow'd 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? | 15 |
| Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still | |
| Litigious men, which quarrels move, | |
| Though she and I do love. | |
| |
| Call's what you will, we are made such by love ; | |
| Call her one, me another fly, | 20 |
| We're tapers too, and at our own cost die, | |
| And we in us find th' eagle and the dove. | |
| The phoenix riddle hath more wit | |
| By us ; we two being one, are it ; | |
| So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit. | 25 |
| 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 tomb or hearse | |
| Our legend be, it will be fit for verse ; | 30 |
| 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 | 35 |
| 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 | 40 |
| 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." | 45 |