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 worship’d be;
• Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
• Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
• But since my soul, whose child love is,
• Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
• More subtile 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 lip, eye, and brow.
•  
• Whilst thus to ballast love, I thought,
• And so more steadily to have gone,
• With wares which would sink admiration,
• I saw, I had love’s pinnace overfraught,
• Ev’ry thy hair for love to work upon
• Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
• For, nor in nothing, nor in things
• Extreme, and scatt’ring bright, can love inhere;
• Then as an Angel, face, and wings
• Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
• So thy love may be my loves sphere;
• Just such disparity
• As is twixt Air and Angels’ purity,
• ‘Twixt women’s love, and men’s will ever be.