The poem is a dialogue between a soul and body lamenting their situation. The soul sees the body as a prison restricting its movement. The body sees the soul as a tormentor, stirring up emotions and diseases. They blame each other for their predicament, with the soul claiming it was trapped in the body against its will, and the body saying the soul designed it for suffering.
The poem is a dialogue between a soul and body lamenting their situation. The soul sees the body as a prison restricting its movement. The body sees the soul as a tormentor, stirring up emotions and diseases. They blame each other for their predicament, with the soul claiming it was trapped in the body against its will, and the body saying the soul designed it for suffering.
The poem is a dialogue between a soul and body lamenting their situation. The soul sees the body as a prison restricting its movement. The body sees the soul as a tormentor, stirring up emotions and diseases. They blame each other for their predicament, with the soul claiming it was trapped in the body against its will, and the body saying the soul designed it for suffering.
The poem is a dialogue between a soul and body lamenting their situation. The soul sees the body as a prison restricting its movement. The body sees the soul as a tormentor, stirring up emotions and diseases. They blame each other for their predicament, with the soul claiming it was trapped in the body against its will, and the body saying the soul designed it for suffering.
This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.
The Definition of Love
ANDREW MARVELL
My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high; It was begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown, But vainly flapp’d its tinsel wing.
And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixt, But Fate does iron wedges drive, And always crowds itself betwixt.
For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor lets them close; Their union would her ruin be, And her tyrannic pow’r depose.
And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant poles have plac’d, (Though love’s whole world on us doth wheel) Not by themselves to be embrac’d;
Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear; And, us to join, the world should all Be cramp’d into a planisphere.
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet; But ours so truly parallel, Though infinite, can never meet.
Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars, Is the conjunction of the mind, And opposition of the stars. A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body ANDREW MARVELL
SOUL O who shall, from this dungeon, raise A soul enslav’d so many ways? With bolts of bones, that fetter’d stands In feet, and manacled in hands; Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear; A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains Of nerves, and arteries, and veins; Tortur’d, besides each other part, In a vain head, and double heart.
BODY O who shall me deliver whole From bonds of this tyrannic soul? Which, stretch’d upright, impales me so That mine own precipice I go; And warms and moves this needless frame, (A fever could but do the same) And, wanting where its spite to try, Has made me live to let me die. A body that could never rest, Since this ill spirit it possest.
SOUL What magic could me thus confine Within another’s grief to pine? Where whatsoever it complain, I feel, that cannot feel, the pain; And all my care itself employs; That to preserve which me destroys; Constrain’d not only to endure Diseases, but, what’s worse, the cure; And ready oft the port to gain, Am shipwreck’d into health again.
BODY But physic yet could never reach The maladies thou me dost teach; Whom first the cramp of hope does tear, And then the palsy shakes of fear; The pestilence of love does heat, Or hatred’s hidden ulcer eat; Joy’s cheerful madness does perplex, Or sorrow’s other madness vex; Which knowledge forces me to know, And memory will not forego. What but a soul could have the wit To build me up for sin so fit? So architects do square and hew Green trees that in the forest grew.
