Of intractable human nature

 Why should our clay

Over our spirits so much sway?

-- John Donne

Fashion is as unpredictable as the weather

And sooner may a gulling weather-spy, 

By drawing forth heav'n's scheme, tell certainly

What fashion'd hats, or ruffs, or suits, next year

Our giddy-headed antique youth will wear. 

-- John Donne

Yes, my son, do something important with your life: Become a doctor, a man of the cloth, a lawyer

Time, which rots all, and makes botches pox,

And, plodding on, must make a calf an ox, 

Hath made a lawyer.

-- John Donne

What became of Hitler

When thou from this world wilt go,

The whole world vapours in thy breath.

-- John Donne

'Twere profanation to tell our love

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
   “The breath goes now," and some say, “No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.



Dull sublunary lovers’ love
   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.

-- John Donne

Distorted virtue

Virtue hath some perverseness; for she will

Neither believe her good, nor others ill.

-- John Donne

Some seed fell among the cockle

 

 

Good seed degenerates, and oft obeys

The soil's disease, and into cockle strays.

-- John Donne

How strange, and wonderful, that changeable mother earth gives birth to mothers, and fathers, who are not

The parents share incubation, changing duty daily for over a month.

Th' air doth not motherly sit on the earth

To hatch her seasons, and give all things birth.

-- John Donne

My sin hurts you, your sin hurts me

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as
well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

MEDITATION XVII
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
John Donne 

A Production from "P"

 

 

 

 

Here gathering Chroniclers, and by them stand

Giddie fantastique Poets of each land.

-- John Donne