Life and Existence

Who ever comes to shroud me, do not harm Nor question much That subtle wreath of hair, which crowns my arm; The mystery, the sign you must not touch, For ’tis my outward soul, Viceroy to that, which then to heaven being gone, Will leave this to control, And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution.

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

Love’s mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes, upon one double string; So to entergraft our hands, as yet Was all the means to make us one, And pictures in our eyes to get Was all our propagation.

That subtle knot which makes us man: So must pure lovers’ souls descend T’ affections, and to faculties, Which sense may reach and apprehend, Else a great Prince in prison lies.

The world’s whole sap is sunk: The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh, Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

For I am every dead thing, In whom love wrought new alchemy. For his art did express A quintessence even from nothingness, From dull privations, and lean emptiness He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s.

All Kings, and all their favorites, All glory of honors, beauties, wits, The sun itself, which makes times, as they pass, Is elder by a year, now, than it was When thou and I first one another saw: All other things, to their destruction draw, Only our love hath no decay; This, no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday, Running, it never runs from us away, But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

Oh do not die, for I shall hate All women so, when thou art gone.

But think that we Are but turn’d aside to sleep.

When I died last, and dear, I die As often as from thee I go.

Sweetest love, I do not go, For weariness of thee, Nor in hope the world can show A fitter love for me; But since that I Must die at last, ’tis best, To use my self in jest Thus by feign’d deaths to die.

Yesternight the sun went hence, And yet is here today.

Yesternight the sun went hence, And yet is here today.

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.

As well a well-wrought urn becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I Did, till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till then But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly? Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den?

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I Did, till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till then But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly? Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den?

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here; Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones.

Some come to take their ease And sleep an act or two.

Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new-create another heir As great in admiration as herself.

Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new-create another heir As great in admiration as herself.