Change and Transformation

All, all of a piece throughout: Thy chase had a beast in view; Thy wars brought nothing about; Thy lovers were all untrue. ’Tis well an old age is out, And time to begin a new.

He rais’d a mortal to the skies, She drew an angel down.

A man so various that he seem’d to be Not one, but all mankind’s epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong; Was everything by starts, and nothing long: But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.

Her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck’d, she eat: Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat, Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe That all was lost.

Unless an age too late, or cold Climate, or years damp my intended wing.

At certain revolutions all the damn’d Are brought: and feel by turns the bitter change Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce.

From morn To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, A summer’s day; and with the setting sun Dropp’d from the zenith like a falling star.

His form had yet not lost All her original brightness, nor appear’d Less than archangel ruin’d, and th’ excess Of glory obscur’d.

Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks In Vallombrosa.

For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor; So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed; And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky. So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves.

At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue: Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forc’d fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish versing: O my only light, It cannot be That I am he On whom thy tempests fell all night.

The harbingers are come. See, see their mark; White is their color, and behold my head.

Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart Could have recovered greenness?

And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world’s spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, Father, Son, are things forgot.

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.

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.

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.

I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And, deeper than did ever plummet sound, I’ll drown my book.

But this rough magic I here abjure.

Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. 57

I’ll queen it no inch further, But milk my ewes and weep.