John Donne

John Donne was a Jacobean metaphysical poet. His works include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, and sermons.

Sourced

• I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
  Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then?
  But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
  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 desir'd, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.
  • The Good Morrow, stanza 1

• 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.
  • The Good Morrow, stanza 2

• My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
  And true plain hearts do in the faces rest,
  Where can we find two better hemispheres
  Without sharp North, without declining West?
  What ever dies, was not mixed equally;
  If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
  Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
  • The Good Morrow, stanza 3

• Though Truth and Falsehood be
  Near twins, yet Truth a little elder is.
  • Satyre III

• 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,
  Or to keep off envy's stinging,
  And find
  What wind
  Serves to advance an honest mind.
  • Song (Go and Catch a Falling Star), stanza 1

• And swear
  No where
  Lives a woman true and fair.
  If thou find'st one, let me know,
  Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
  Yet do not, I would not go,
  Though at next door we might meet,
  Though she were true, when you met her,
  And last, till you write your letter,
  Yet she
  Will be
  False, ere I come, to two, or three.
  • Song (Go and Catch a Falling Star), stanzas 2-3

• I have done one braver thing
  Than all the Worthies did;
  And yet a braver thence doth spring,
  Which is to keep that hid.
  • The Undertaking, stanza 1

• But he who loveliness within
  Hath found, all outward loathes,
  For he who color loves, and skin,
  Loves but their oldest clothes.
  • The Undertaking, stanza 4

• And dare love that, and say so too,
  And forget the He and She.
  • The Undertaking, stanza 5

• Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
  Why dost thou thus,
  Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
  Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
  • The Sun Rising, stanza 1

• Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
  Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
  • The Sun Rising, stanza 1

• She is all states, and all princes, I,
  Nothing else is.
  • The Sun Rising, stanza 3

• For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love.
  • The Canonization, stanza 1

• 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.
  • The Canonization, stanza 3

• As well a well-wrought urn becomes
  The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs.
  • The Canonization, stanza 4

• I am two fools, I know,
  For loving, and for saying so
  In whining poetry.
  • The Triple Fool, stanza 1

• Who are a little wise, the best fools be.
  • The Triple Fool, stanza 2

• 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 feigned deaths to die.
  • Song (Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go), stanza 1

• Yesternight the sun went hence,
  And yet is here today.
  • Song (Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go), stanza 2

• But think that we
  Are but turned aside to sleep.
  • Song (Sweetest Love, I Do Not Go), stanza 5

• When I died last, and dear, I die
  As often as from thee I go.
  • The Legacy, stanza 1

• Oh do not die, for I shall hate
  All women so, when thou art gone.
  • A Fever, stanza 1

• Twice and thrice had I loved thee,
  Before I knew thy face or name.
  • Air and Angels, stanza 1

• 'Tis true, 'tis day; what though it be?
  O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
  Why should we rise, because 'tis light?
  Did we lie down, because 'twas night?
  Love which in spite of darkness brought us hither
  Should in despite of light keep us together.
  • Break of Day, stanza 1

• 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.
  • The Anniversary, stanza 1

• Send home my long strayed eyes to me,
  Which (Oh) too long have dwelt on thee.
  • The Message, stanza 1

• 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 interred; yet all these seem to laugh,
  Compared with me, who am their epitaph.
  • A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, stanza 1

• 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 ruined me, and I am re-begot
  Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
  • A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day, stanza 2

• Come live with me, and be my love,
  And we will some new pleasures prove
  Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
  With silken lines, and silver hooks.
  • The Bait, stanza 1

• Dull sublunary lovers' love
  (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
  Absence, because it doth remove
  Those things which elemented it.
  • A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, stanza 4

• 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.
  • A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, stanza 6

• 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.
  • A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, stanza 7

• 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.
  • The Extasy, line 7

• 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 Extasy, line 64

• Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
  But yet the body is his book.
  • The Extasy, line 71

• I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,
  Who died before the god of love was born.
  • Love's Deity, stanza 1

• To rage, to lust, to write to, to commend,
  All is the purlieu of the god of love.
  • Love's Deity, stanza 3

• Who ever comes to shroud me, do not harm
  Nor question much
  That subtle wreth 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.
  • The Funeral, stanza 1

• A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.
  • The Relic, stanza 1

• Take heed of loving me.
  • The Prohibition, stanza 1

• So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss,
  Which sucks two souls, and vapors both away.
  • The Expiration, stanza 1

• Ah cannot we
  As well as cocks and lions jocund be,
  After such pleasures?
  • Farewell to Love, stanza 3

• Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls;
  For, thus friends absent speak.
  • Verse Letter to Sir Henry Woton, written before April 1598, line 1

• 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.
  • An Anatomy of the World, The First Anniversary

• We understood
  Her by her sight; her pure, and eloquent blood
  Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
  That one might almost say, her body thought.
  • Of the Progress of the Soul, The Second Anniversary

• Since I am coming to that holy room,
  Where, with thy choir of saints forevermore,
  I shall be made thy music; as I come
  I tune the instrument here at the door,
  And what I must do then, think here before.
  • Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness, stanza 1

• Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
  Cosmographers, and their map, who lie
  Flat on this bed.
  • Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness, stanza 2

• When my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly upon me, when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to princes, for they shall be equal but in dust.
  • XXVI Sermons, No. 26, Death's Duel, last sermon, February 15, 1631

• Absence, hear thou my protestation
  Against thy strength,
  Distance, and length;
  Do what thou canst for alteration
  • Poem Present in Absence http://www.bartleby.com/101/197.html
  • Attribution likely but not proven http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-7937(191107)6%3A3%3C383%3ATAO%22HT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B

Elegies

• Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.
  • No. 2, The Anagram, line 27

• Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to love.
  • No. 7, Natures Lay Idiot, line 1

• She, and comparisons are odious.
  • No. 8, The Comparison, line 54. Compare: "Comparisons are odious", John Fortescue, De Laudibus Leg. Angliæ, Chap. xix; "Comparisons are odorous", William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, act iii, scene v.

• No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace,
  As I have seen in one autumnal face.
  • No. 9, The Autumnal, line 1

• The heavens rejoice in motion, why should I
  Abjure my so much loved variety.
  • No. 17, Variety, line 1

• Who ever loves, if he do not propose
  The right true end of love, he's one that goes
  To sea for nothing but to make him sick.
  • No. 18, Love's Progress, line 1

• The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts
  Not of two lovers, but two loves the nests.
  • No. 18, Love's Progress, line 61

• Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
  • No. 19, To His Mistress Going to Bed, line 24

• O my America! my new-found land.
  • No. 19, To His Mistress Going to Bed, line 27

• Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
  As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
  To taste whole joys.
  • No. 19, To His Mistress Going to Bed, line 33

• Licence my roving hands, and let them go
  Before, behind, between, above, below.
  O, my America, my Newfoundland
  My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
  My mine of precious stones, my empery;
  How am I blest in thus discovering thee !
  To enter in these bonds, is to be free ;
  Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be."
  
  • No. 19, To His Mistress Going to Bed

Holy Sonnets

• I am a little world made cunningly
  Of elements, and an angelic sprite.
  • No. 5, line 1

• At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow
  Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
  From death, you numberless infinities
  Of souls, and to your scattred bodies go.
  • No. 7, line 1

• All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
  Despair, law, chance, hath slain.
  • No. 7, line 6

• If poisonous minerals, and if that tree,
  Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,
  If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
  Cannot be damned; alas; why should I be?
  • No. 9, line 1

• Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
  Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
  For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
  Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
  • No. 10, line 1

• Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
  And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
  And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
  And better than thy stroke.
  • No. 10, line 9

• One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
  And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
  • No. 10, line 13

• What if this present were the world's last night?
  • No. 13, line 1

• Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
  As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.
  • No. 14, line 1

• Show me, dear Christ, Thy spouse, so bright and clear.
  • No. 18, line 1

Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

• I observe the physician with the same diligence as he the disease.
  • Meditation 5

• A man that is not afraid of a Lion is afraid of a Cat.
  • Meditation 6

• Age is a sicknesse, and Youth is an ambush.
  • Meditation 7

• Let not one bring Learning, another Diligence, another Religion, but every one bring all.
  • Meditation 7

• I do nothing upon myself, and yet am mine own executioner.
  • Meditation 12

• The flea, though he kill none, he does all the harm he can.
  • Meditation 12

• Hee drinkes misery, and he tastes happinesse; he mowes misery, and he gleanes happinesse; he journeys in misery, he does but walke in happinesse.
  • Meditation 13

• How deepe do we dig, and for how coarse gold?
  • Meditation 13

• No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine own were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
  • Modern version: 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 friends 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; it tolls for thee.
  • Meditation 17; Probably the most famous of Donne's "Meditations" this statement provided the title to a famous novel by Ernest Hemingway.

LXXX Sermons (1640)

• What gnashing is not a comfort, what gnawing of the worm is not a tickling, what torment is not a marriage bed to this damnation, to be secluded eternally, eternally, eternally from the sight of God?
  • No. 76, preached to the Earl of Carlisle, c. autumn 1622

• Now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.
  • No. 3, preached on Christmas Day, 1625

• I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.
  • No. 80, preached at the funeral of Sir William Cokayne, December 12, 1626

• And what is so intricate, so entangling as death? Who ever got out of a winding sheet?
  • No. 54, preached to the King at Whitehall, April 5, 1628

• Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthical soul!
  • No. 48, preached upon the Day of St. Paul's Conversion, January 25, 1629

Unsourced

• He was the Word, that spake it:
  He took the bread and brake it;
  And what that Word did make it,
  I do believe and take it.
  • Divine Poems, "On the Sacrament". Attributed by many writers to Elizabeth I. It is not in the original edition of Donne, but first appears in the edition of 1654, p. 352.