Your passive valour, and you shall find then,
In that you have odds enough of any man.

A NOCTURNAL UPON ST. LUCY'S DAY

BEING THE SHORTEST DAY

(13 Dec.).

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

The sun is spent,

and now

his flasks

Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

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 interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At 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 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.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,

Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;

I, by Love's limbec, am the grave

Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so

Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show

Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;

Were I a man, that I were one

I needs must know; I should prefer,

If I were any beast,

Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest, And love; all, all some properties invest;

If I an ordinary nothing were,

As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,

Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.

AIR AND ANGELS

TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.

Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.

But since my soul, whose child love is, Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do, More subtle than the parent is

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 lips, eyes, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,

And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiratiön,

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; Then as an angel face and wings

Just such disparity

As is 'twixt air's and angel's purity,

'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.