Passages from Poetry

What if surrender is the only route out of captivity?

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for youAs yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bendYour force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,But am betroth’d unto your enemy;Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,Take me to you, imprison me, for I,Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

What is left of a person after love has emptied them?

Study me then, you who shall lovers beAt the next world, that is, at the next spring;For I am a very dead thing,In whom Love wrought new alchemy.For his art did expressA quintessence even from nothingness,From dull privations, and lean emptiness;He ruin’d me, and I am re-begotOf absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

The kind of love that stretches rather than snaps when parted.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love—Whose soul is sense—cannot admitOf absence, ’cause it doth removeThe thing which elemented it.But we by a love so far refined,That ourselves know not what it is,Inter-assured of the mind,Care less eyes, lips and hands to miss.Our two souls therefore, which are one,Though I must go, endure not yetA breach, but an expansion,Like gold to airy thinness beat.

The strange relief of being inconsistent in your own devotion.

Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one:Inconstancy unnaturally hath begotA constant habit; that when I would notI change in vows, and in devotion.As humorous is my contritionAs my profane love, and as soon forgot:As riddlingly distempered, cold and hot,As praying, as mute; as infinite, as none.I durst not view heaven yesterday; and todayIn prayers, and flattering speeches I court God:Tomorrow I quake with true fear of his rod.So my devout fits come and go awayLike a fantastic ague: save that hereThose are my best days, when I shake with fear.

The heart does not vanish when it breaks; it multiplies.

Yet nothing can to nothing fall,Nor any place be empty quite;Therefore I think my breast hath allThose pieces still, though they be not unite;And now, as broken glasses showA hundred lesser faces, soMy rags of heart can like, wish, and adore,But after one such love, can love no more.

The smallest creature in the room becomes a case for surrender.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,How little that which thou deniest me is;It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.Thou know’st that this cannot be saidA sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;Yet this enjoys before it woo,And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two;And this, alas! is more than we would do.

Grief keeps its own calendar, and it is not the one on the wall.

For my first twenty years, since yesterday,I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away,For forty more I fed on favours past,And forty on hopes, that thou wouldst they might last;Tears drown’d one hundred, and sighs blew out two;A thousand, I did neither think, nor do,Or not divide, all being one thought of you;Or in a thousand more, forgot that too.Yet call not this long life; but think that IAm, by being dead, immortal; can ghosts die?

What if the purest thing in you comes from the least refined?

For when from herbs the pure part must be wonFrom gross, by ’stilling, this is better doneBy despised dung, than by the fire of sun.Care not then, madam, how low your praises lie;In labourers’ ballads oft more pietyGod finds, than in Te Deum’s melody;And ordnance, raised on towers, so many mileSend not their voice, nor last so long a while,As fires from the earth’s low vaults in Sicil isle.

The self as a plot of land, rented and due for return.

So works retiredness in us. To roamGiddily and be everywhere, but at home,Such freedom doth a banishment become.We are but farmers of ourselves, yet may,If we can stock ourselves, and thrive, uplayMuch, much dear treasure for the great rent day.Manure thyself then, to thyself be improved;And with vain outward things be no more moved,But to know that I love thee and would be loved.