C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Love’s Growth
By John Donne (1572–1631)
I
As I had thought it was,
Because it doth endure
Vicissitude and season as the grass;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make it more.
But if this medicine love, which cures all sorrow
With more, not only be no quintessence
But mixed of all stuffs paining soul or sense,
And of the sun his working vigor borrow,
Love’s not so pure and abstract as they use
To say, which have no mistress but their muse,
But as all else, being elemented too,
Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.
Love by the spring is grown;
As in the firmament
Stars by the sun are not enlarged, but shown,
Gentle love-deeds, as blossoms on a bough,
From love’s awakened root do bud out now.
If, as in water stirred, more circles be
Produced by one, love such additions take,
Thou, like so many spheres, but one heaven make,
For they are all concentric unto thee;
And though each spring do add to love new heat,
As princes do in times of action get
New taxes and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate the spring’s increase.