As virtuous men pass mildly away
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
Now his breath goes, and some say, no ;
So let us melt and make no noise,
Nor 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 trepidations of the spheres,
Though greater far, are innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, for that it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love so far refined
That ourselves know not what it is,
Interassured 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 centre 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.