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Most truly honoured, and as truly dear, If worth in me or ought I do appear, Who can of right better demand the same Than may your worthy self from whom it came? The principal might yield a greater sum, Yet handled ill, amounts but to this crumb; My stock's so small I know not how to pay, My bond remains in force unto this day; Yet for part payment take this simple mite, Where nothing's to be had, kings loose their right. Such is my debt I may not say forgive, But as I can, I'll pay it while I live; Such is my bond, none can discharge but I, Yet paying is not paid until I die.

Because I to my brethern wrote and to my sisters two: Good sister Anne, you this might wote, if so I should not do To you, or ere I parted hence, You vainly had bestowed expence. Yet is it not for that I write, for nature did you bind To do me good, and to requite hath nature me inclined: Wherefore good sister take in gree These simple lines that come from me. Wherein I wish you Nestor's days, in happy health to rest: With such success in all assays as those which God hath blest: Your husband with your pretty boys, God keep them free from all annoys. And grant if that my luck it be to linger here so long Till they be men, that I may see for learning them so strong That they may march amongst the best Of them which learning have possest. By that time will my aged years perhaps a staff require: And quakingly as still in fears my limbs draw to the fire: Yet joy I shall them so to see, If any joy in age there be. Good sister so I you commend to him that made us all: I know you huswifery intend, though I to writing fall: Wherefore no lenger shall you stay From business that profit may. Had I a husband, or a house, and all that longs thereto, My self could frame about to rouse, as other women do: But till some household cares me tie, My books and pen I will apply.

Can I not sin, but thou wilt be My private protonotary? Can I not woo thee to pass by A short and sweet iniquity? I'll cast a mist and cloud upon My delicate transgression, So utter dark as that no eye Shall see the hugg'd impiety. Gifts blind the wise, and bribes do please, And wind all other witnesses; And wilt not thou with gold be tied To lay thy pen and ink aside, That in the murk and tongueless night Wanton I may, and thou not write? It will not be; and therefore, now, For times to come I'll make this vow, From aberrations to live free, So I'll not fear the Judge, or thee.

When roaring gloom surged inward and you cried, Groping for friendly hands, and clutched, and died, Like racing smoke, swift from your lolling head Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled. Yet, though my dreams that throng the darkened stair Can bring me no report of how you fare, Safe quit of wars, I speed you on your way Up lonely, glimmering fields to find new day, Slow-rising, saintless, confident and kind— Dear, red-faced father God who lit your mind.

Beloved beauty who inspires love in me from afar, your face obscured except when your celestial image stirs my heart in sleep, or in the fields where light and nature's laughter shine more lovely— was it maybe you who blessed the innocent age called golden, and do you now, blithe spirit, fly among men? Or does that miser fate who hides you from us save you for the future? No hope of seeing you alive remains for me now, except when, naked and alone, my soul will go down a new street to its unknown home. Already at the dawn of my dark, uncertain day I imagined you a fellow traveler on this arid ground. But there's no thing that resembles you on earth. And if someone had a face like yours, in act and word she'd be, though something like you, far less beautiful. In spite of all the suffering fate decreed for human time, if there were anyone on earth who truly loved you as my thought depicts you, this life for him would be a blessing. And I see clearly how your love would lead me still to strive for praise and virtue, as I used to in my early years. Though heaven gave no comfort for our troubles, yet with you mortal life would be like what in heaven leads to divinity. In the valleys, where the song of the weary farmer sounds, and when I sit and mourn the illusions of youth fading, and on the hills where I recall and grieve for my lost desires and my life's lost hope, I think of you and start to shake. If only I, in this sad age and unhealthy atmosphere, could keep hold of your noble look; for since the real thing's missing I must make do with the image. Whether you are the only one of the eternal ideas eternal wisdom refuses to see arrayed in sensible form to know the pains of mortal life in transitory spoils, or if in the supernal spheres another earth from among unnumbered worlds receives you and a near star lovelier than the Sun warms you and you breathe benigner ether, from here, where years are both ill-starred and brief, accept this hymn from your unnoticed lover.

Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny The sunshine of the Sun’s enlivening eye? Without thy light what light remains in me? Thou art my life; my way, my light’s in thee; I live, I move, and by thy beams I see. Thou art my life-if thou but turn away My life’s a thousand deaths. Thou art my way- Without thee, Love, I travel not but stray. My light thou art-without thy glorious sight My eyes are darken’d with eternal night. My Love, thou art my way, my life, my light. Thou art my way; I wander if thou fly. Thou art my light; if hid, how blind am I! Thou art my life; if thou withdraw’st, I die. My eyes are dark and blind, I cannot see: To whom or whither should my darkness flee, But to that light?-and who’s that light but thee? If I have lost my path, dear lover, say, Shall I still wander in a doubtful way? Love, shall a lamb of Israel’s sheepfold stray? My path is lost, my wandering steps do stray; I cannot go, nor can I safely stay; Whom should I seek but thee, my path, my way? And yet thou turn’st thy face away and fly’st me! And yet I sue for grace and thou deny’st me! Speak, art thou angry, Love, or only try’st me? Thou art the pilgrim’s path, the blind man’s eye, The dead man’s life. On thee my hopes rely: If I but them remove, I surely die. Dissolve thy sunbeams, close thy wings and stay! See, see how I am blind, and dead, and stray! -O thou art my life, my light, my way! Then work thy will! If passion bid me flee, My reason shall obey, my wings shall be Stretch’d out no farther than from me to thee!

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy, Until I labour, I in labour lie. The foe oft-times having the foe in sight, Is tir’d with standing though he never fight. Off with that girdle, like heaven’s Zone glistering, But a far fairer world encompassing. Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear, That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there. Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime, Tells me from you, that now it is bed time. Off with that happy busk, which I envy, That still can be, and still can stand so nigh. Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals, As when from flowery meads th’hill’s shadow steals. Off with that wiry Coronet and shew The hairy Diadem which on you doth grow: Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed. In such white robes, heaven’s Angels used to be Received by men; Thou Angel bringst with thee A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know, By this these Angels from an evil sprite, Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright. Licence my roving hands, and let them go, Before, behind, between, above, below. O my America! my new-found-land, My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d, My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie, How blest am I in this discovering thee! To enter in these bonds, is to be free; Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee, As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth’d must be, To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use Are like Atlanta’s balls, cast in men’s views, That when a fool’s eye lighteth on a Gem, His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them. Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made For lay-men, are all women thus array’d; Themselves are mystic books, which only we (Whom their imputed grace will dignify) Must see reveal’d. Then since that I may know; As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew Thy self: cast all, yea, this white linen hence, There is no penance due to innocence. To teach thee, I am naked first; why then What needst thou have more covering than a man.

Invoked every sundown, it’s you, painted on clouds rouging our treasured plain and all who walk it, with leaf-fresh kids and women damp from traveling, city-bound, in the radiance of a just-stopped shower; it’s you, mother eternally young, courtesy of death’s plucking hand, rose at the fragrant point of unpetaling, you who are the alpha of every neurosis, every torturing anxiety, and for this I give you gratitude for time past, time present, time future.

That figure in the cellarage you hear upsetting boxes is an antic of the mind, a baroque imp cobbled up under bulbs whose flickering perplexes night’s impecunious craftsman, making what he makes turn out irregular, awry, every effort botched in its own wrong way. You belong, I said, laid out chalk- white between a layer of tautened cotton gauze and another of the selfsame rubbish that you are wreaking havoc on tonight—and it didn’t disagree. What’s more, I said, you are amiss in this ad hoc quest for origin and purpose. Whatever destiny it is you are meant to aspire to before you retire to that soup-bowl of oblivion such figments as we expect to find final rest in couldn’t possibly be contained in these boxes. And again—no contest. And when I was in need, I said, you raveled off in the long-winded ploys of a winless October, unfaithful to the one whose instincts had devised you . . . —At this, the figure dropped the box from its hands, turned down a dock I remembered and wept. I followed it down there, sat beside it and wept. Looking out on the water in time we came to see being itself had made things fall apart this way. We envied the simplicity implicit in sea-sponges and similar marine life, their resistance to changes across millennia we took to be deliberate, an art practiced untheatrically beneath the water’s surface. We admired the example the whole sea set, actually. Maritime pauses flew like gulls in our exchanges. We wondered that much longer before we had left.

Uncessant Minutes, whil’st you move you tell The time that tells our life, which though it run Never so fast or farr, you’r new begun Short steps shall overtake; for though life well May scape his own Account, it shall not yours, You are Death’s Auditors, that both divide And summ what ere that life inspir’d endures Past a beginning, and through you we bide The doom of Fate, whose unrecall’d Decree You date, bring, execute; making what’s new Ill and good, old, for as we die in you, You die in Time, Time in Eternity.