John Donne

“ Man, who is the noblest part of the earth, melts so away, as if he were a statue, not of earth, but of snow. We see his own envy melts him, he grows lean with that; he will say, another's beauty melts him; but he feels that a fever doth not melt him like snow, but pour him out like lead, like iron, like brass melted in a furnace; it doth not only melt him, but calcine him, reduce him to atoms, and to ashes; not to water, but to lime. And how quickly? Sooner than thou canst receive an answer, sooner than thou canst conceive the question ”

“ We can die by it, if not live by love,
⁠And if unfit for tomb or 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 ”

“ And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'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; they 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 every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he. ”

“ Love must not be, but take a body too;
⁠And therefore what thou wert, and who,
⁠I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.
Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
⁠And so more steadily to have gone,
⁠With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught;
⁠Thy every hair for love to work upon
Is much too much; some fitter must be sought;
⁠For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere ”

“ Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day,
Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?
⁠Ends love in this, that my man
Can be as happy as I can, if he can
Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play?
⁠That loving wretch that swears,
'Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,
⁠Which he in her angelic finds,
⁠Would swear as justly, that he hears,
In that day's rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres.
⁠Hope not for mind in women; at their best,
⁠Sweetness and wit they are, but mummy, possess'd. ”

“ Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."
⁠She's all states, and all princes I;
⁠Nothing else is;
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
⁠Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
⁠In that the world's contracted thus;
⁠Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
⁠To warm the world, that's done in warming us. ”

“ Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den?
'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.
And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown;
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one. ”

“ It is a faint comfort to know the worst when the worst is remediless, and a weaker than that to know much ill, and not to know that that is the worst. A woman is comforted with the birth of her son, her body is eased of a burden; but if she could prophetically read his history, how ill a man, perchance how ill a son, he would prove, she should receive a greater burden into her mind. Scarce any purchase that is not clogged with secret incumbrances; scarce any happiness that hath not in it so much of the nature of false and base money, as that the allay is more than the metal. ”

“ And can the other world name so many venomous, so many consuming, so many monstrous creatures, as we can diseases of all these kinds? O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches! How much do we lack of having remedies for every disease, when as yet we have not names for them? But we have a Hercules against these giants, these monsters; that is, the physician: he musters up all the forces of the other world to succour this; all nature to relieve man. We have the physician, but we are not the physician. ”

“ Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls ”