I think I should include poetry from my favorite poets on Sirenprose as well.
I love Shakespeare, but my all time favorite poem is this one, by John Donne. Two people as the arms inside a clock, a circle, the only shape that is perfect, tick tock like a heartbeat, and if one gets too far the other follows... what's not to love about this piece he wrote for his wife.
A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
by John
Donne
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,
5
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did,
and meant ; 10
But
trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 15
The thing which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it
is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to
miss. 20
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness
beat.
If they be two, they are two so
25
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul,
the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth
roam, 30
It leans, and
hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run
;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
35
And makes me end where I begun.
from
Donne, John.
Poems of John Donne. vol I.
E.
K. Chambers, ed.
London, Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 51-52.
Mayans believed time is round
