Love's Exchange

• Love, any devil else but you
• Would for a given soul give something too.
• At court your fellows every day
• Give th' art of rhyming, huntsmanship, or play,
• For them which were their own before;
• Only I have nothing, which gave more,
• But am, alas ! by being lowly, lower.
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• I ask no dispensation now,
• To falsify a tear, or sigh, or vow;
• I do not sue from thee to draw
• A non obstante on nature's law;
• These are prerogatives, they inhere
• In thee and thine; none should forswear
• Except that he Love's minion were.
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• Give me thy weakness, make me blind,
• Both ways, as thou and thine, in eyes and mind;
• Love, let me never know that this
• Is love, or, that love childish is;
• Let me not know that others know
• That she knows my paines, lest that so
• A tender shame make me mine own new woe.
• If thou give nothing, yet thou 'rt just,
• Because I would not thy first motions trust;
• Small towns which stand stiff, till great shot
• Enforce them, by war's law condition not;
• Such in Love's warfare is my case;
• I may not article for grace,
• Having put Love at last to show this face.
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• This face, by which he could command
• And change th' idolatry of any land,
• This face, which, wheresoe'er it comes,
• Can call vow'd men from cloisters, dead from tombs,
• And melt both poles at once, and store
• Deserts with cities, and make more
• Mines in the earth, than quarries were before.
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• For this Love is enraged with me,
• Yet kills not; if I must example be
• To future rebels, if th' unborn
• Must learn by my being cut up and torn,
• Kill, and dissect me, Love; for this
• Torture against thine own end is;
• Rack'd carcasses make ill anatomies.