An Epithalamion for Lawyers

Your learn’d identities untie

And in the nuptial bed (love’s altar) lie

            A pleasing sacrifice; now dispossess

Yourselves of chains and robes which were put on

To adorn the day, not you; for you, alone,

            Like virtue and truth, are best in nakedness;

            This bed is only to the single state

A grave, but to a better one, a cradle;

Till now you were but able

            To be what now you are; so that you might

No longer say, I may be, but, I am,

            Tonight put on perfection and a lover’s name.

--John Donne

A Wedding Song on St. Valentine’s Day

Hail, Bishop Valentine, whose day this is,

            All the air is thy diocese,

            And all the chirping choristers

And other birds are thy parishioners;

            Thou marriest every year

The lyric lark, and the grave whispering dove,

The sparrow that neglects his life for love,

The household bird with the red stomacher,

            Thou mak’st the blackbird speed as soon

As doth the goldfinch, or the halcyon;

The husband cock looks out, and straight is sped,

And meets his wife, who brings her feather-bed.

This day more cheerfully than ever shine,

This day, which might enflame thyself, old Valentine.

Till now, thou warm’dst with multiplying loves

            Two larks, two sparrows, or two doves;           

                        All that is nothing unto this,

For thou this day couplest two Phoenixes;

                        Thou mak’st a taper see

What the sun never saw, and what the Ark

(Which was of fowls and beasts the cage and park)

Did not contain, one bed contains, through thee,

                        Two Phoenixes, whose joined breasts

Are unto one another mutual nests,

Where motion kindles such fires as shall give

Young Phoenixes, and yet the old shall live.

Whose love and courage never shall decline,

But make the whole year through, thy day, O Valentine.

--John Donne

From “The Anniversary”

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 its first, last, everlasting day.

--John Donne

The Good-Morrow

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 snored 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 on little room an everywhere.

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

Let maps to others worlds on worlds have shown,

Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.

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.

Whatever 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.

--John Donne