| |
| AS virtuous men pass mildly away, | |
| And whisper to their souls to go; | |
| While some of their sad friends do say, | |
| Now his breath goes, and some say, No; | |
| |
| So let us melt, and make no noise, | 5 |
| No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move; | |
| ’Twere profanation of our joys | |
| To tell the laity our love. | |
| |
| Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears | |
| Men reckon what it did and meant; | 10 |
| But trepidations of the spheres, | |
| Though greater far, are innocent. | |
| |
| Dull sublunary lovers’ love, | |
| Whose soul is sense, cannot admit | |
| Absence; for that it doth remove | 15 |
| Those things which elemented it. | |
| |
| But we, by a love so far refined, | |
| That ourselves know not what it is, | |
| Inter-assurèd of the mind, | |
| Careless, eyes, lips and hands to miss, | 20 |
| |
| —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. | |
| |
| If they be two, they are two so | 25 |
| As stiff twin compasses are two; | |
| Thy soul, the fixt foot, makes no show | |
| To move, but doth if th’ other do. | |
| |
| And though it in the centre sit, | |
| Yet when the other far doth roam, | 30 |
| It leans and hearkens after it, | |
| And grows erect as that comes home. | |
| |
| Such wilt thou be to me, who must, | |
| Like th’ other foot, obliquely run; | |
| Thy firmness makes my circles just, | 35 |
| And makes me end where I begun. | |
| |
