greykit.poetry — #1630s
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1638
[john-milton]
Lycidas
A pastoral elegy for a college contemporary drowned in the Irish Sea, which breaks off mid-lament to arraign the corrupt clergy of the age — the two-handed engine at the door — before rising into consolation and turning away to fresh woods and pastures new.
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1633
[john-donne]
A Valediction: forbidding mourning
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.
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1633
[george-herbert]
Easter Wings
A pattern poem whose lines thin to Most poore and Most thinne and then widen again, so that each stanza is printed in the shape of a wing: the fall itself furthers the flight.
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1633
[john-donne]
Holy Sonnet X: Death be not proud
Death is addressed to its face and steadily demoted — from dreadful power to a slave of fate and chance, no better than poppy or charms at bringing sleep — until the last line kills it outright.
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1633
[john-donne]
Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter my heart, three person’d God
A prayer that asks God to stop knocking and start breaking: the speaker is a usurped town whose viceroy reason has proved untrue, and only being imprisoned can free him, only being ravished can make him chaste.
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1633
[george-herbert]
Love (III)
Love keeps house and the guest keeps refusing — guilty of dust and sin, unworthy to look, fit only to serve — and every refusal is quietly answered, until: So I did sit and eat.
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1633
[george-herbert]
The Collar
A tantrum in verse — the speaker strikes the board, swears he will abroad, and rages at his rope of sands in lines that break their own metre — until one word, calling Childe, ends it: And I reply’d, My Lord.
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1633
[john-donne]
The Flea
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.
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1633
[george-herbert]
The Pulley
God pours every blessing on man but keeps back rest, so that weariness itself will do the work goodness might not — a restlessness engineered to toss him at last to God’s breast.
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1633
[john-donne]
The Sunne Rising
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.
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1633
[john-donne]
The good-morrow
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.
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1633
[george-herbert]
Vertue
Day, rose and spring are each praised and then sentenced in the same breath — for thou must die — until only the seasoned timber of a virtuous soul is left standing when the whole world turns to coal.