Others

Calumnies are answered best with silence.

Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.

I am a little world made cunningly Of elements, and an angelic sprite.

Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls; For, thus friends absent speak.

No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace, As I have seen in one autumnal face.

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

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.

I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost, Who died before the god of love was born.

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

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.

If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two, Thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do.

Our two souls therefore which are one, Though I must go, endure not yet A breach, but an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Absence, because it doth remove Those things which elemented it.

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.

Who are a little wise, the best fools be.

I am two fools, I know, For loving, and for saying so In whining poetry.

But he who loveliness within Hath found, all outward loathes, For he who color loves, and skin, Loves but their oldest clothes.

Go, and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me, where all past years are, Or who cleft the Devil’s foot. Teach me to hear mermaids singing.

He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one; Exceeding wise, fair-spoken, and persuading; Lofty and sour to them that lov’d him not; But, to those men that sought him sweet as summer.

Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain-tops that freeze, Bow themselves, when he did sing.

The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep, Will make me sleep again.

There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple: If the ill spirit have so fair a house, Good things will strive to dwell with ’t.

The fringed curtains of thine eye advance.

This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury, and my passion, With its sweet air.