The Canonization

• For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love ;
• Or chide my palsy, or my gout ;
• My five gray hairs, or ruin'd fortune flout ;
• With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve ;
• Take you a course, get you a place,
• Observe his Honour, or his Grace ;
• Or the king's real, or his stamp'd face
• Contemplate ; what you will, approve,
• So you will let me love.
•  
• Alas ! alas ! who's injured by my love?
• What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd?
• Who says my tears have overflow'd his ground?
• When did my colds a forward spring remove?
• When did the heats which my veins fill
• Add one more to the plaguy bill?
• Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still
• Litigious men, which quarrels move,
• Though she and I do love.
•  
• Call's what you will, we are made such by love ;
• Call her one, me another fly,
• We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
• And we in us find th' eagle and the dove.
• The phoenix riddle hath more wit
• By us ; we two being one, are it ;
• So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
• We die and rise the same, and prove
• Mysterious by this love.
•  
• We can die by it, if not live by love,
• And if unfit for tomb or hearse
• Our legend be, it will be fit for verse ;
• And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
• We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms ;
• As well a well-wrought urn becomes
• The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
• And by these hymns, all shall approve
• Us canonized for love ;
•  
• And thus invoke us, "You, whom reverend love
• Made one another's hermitage ;
• You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage ;
• Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove
• Into the glasses of your eyes ;
• So made such mirrors, and such spies,
• That they did all to you epitomize—
• Countries, towns, courts beg from above
• A pattern of your love."