greykit.poetry — John Donne/songs-and-sonets

• 1633 [john-donne] A Valediction: forbidding mourning
  Songs and Sonets

  Parting should be as quiet as the death of virtuous men — no tear-floods, no sigh-tempests — because a love refined beyond the senses only stretches, like gold to airy thinness, or like the two legs of a compass.

  #lyric#love#parting#1630s
• 1633 [john-donne] The Flea
  Songs and Sonets

  A flea that has bitten them both becomes, by three turns of outrageous logic, their marriage bed and marriage temple — and when she kills it and nothing is lost, the argument simply changes sides and wins anyway.

  #lyric#seduction#wit#1630s
• 1633 [john-donne] The Sunne Rising
  Songs and Sonets

  The sun is scolded through the bedroom curtains as a busy old fool and a saucy pedantic wretch — until the poem swallows the world whole: she is all states, he all princes, and this bed is the centre the sun must warm.

  #lyric#love#aubade#1630s
• 1633 [john-donne] The good-morrow
  Songs and Sonets

  Everything before this love was a sucking on country pleasures, a sleep in the seven sleepers' den; waking, the lovers find each other's faces in each other's eyes and make one little room an everywhere that cannot die.

  #lyric#love#waking#1630s