For God's sake hold your
tongue, and let me love,
Or
chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five grey hairs,
or ruined fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with arts
improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honour, or his grace,
Or the King's real, or his
stamped 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'are 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,
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!"
