1 For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love,
2 Or chide my palsie, or my gout,
3 My five gray haires, or ruin’d fortune flout,
4 With wealth your state, your minde with Arts improve
5 Take you a course, get you a place,
6 Observe his honour, or his grace,
7 Or the Kings reall, or his stamped face
8 Contemplate, what you will, approve,
9 So you will let me love
10 Alas, alas, who’s injur’d by my love?
11 What merchants ships have my sighs drown’d?
12 Who saies my teares have overflow’d his ground?
13 When did my colds a forward spring remove?
14 When did the heats which my veines fill
15 Adde one more, to the plaguie Bill?
16 Soldiers finde warres, and Lawyers finde out still
17 Litigious men, which quarrels move,
18 Though she and I do love
19 Call us what you will, wee are made such by love;
20 Call her one, mee another flye,
21 We’are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die,
22 And wee in us finde the’Eagle and the dove,
23 The Phoenix ridle hath more wit
24 By us, we two being one, are it.
25 So, to one neutrall thing both sexes fit.
26 Wee dye and rise the same, and prove
27 Mysterious by this love.
28 Wee can dye by it, if not live by love,
29 And if unfit for tombes and hearse
30 Our legends bee, it will be fit for verse;
31 And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,
32 We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes;
33 As well a well wrought urne becomes
34 The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes,
35 And by these hymnes, all shall approve
36 Us Canoniz’d for Love.
37 And thus invoke us; You whom reverend love
38 Made one anothers hermitage;
39 You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage,
40 Who did the whole worlds soule contract, & drove
41 Into the glasses of your eyes
42 So made such mirrors, and such spies,
43 That they did all to you epitomize,
44 Countries, Townes, Courts: Beg from above
45 A patterne of our love.