Since pleasure is a sovereign cure
How can my piteous pain endure?
To-night I hide my face in your dress,
O Font of Peace! O Healing Tenderness!

Love with a liquid ecstasy
Did wholly fill me up,
And since his drink is sweet to me
Can I despise his cup?

I wish you'd a farm on the hills, my Dear,
And need not work for hire.
For though I'm cold in the churchyard here,
And cannot sit by your fire,
I'd walk the paths of your house, some nights,
And haply look into your room:
Then I'd always see my Love's home-lights
When I stood on the rail of my tomb.

Shall I mock you, and tell you that love shall endure,
Knowing you know the quality of things that are secure?
Let love be fierce as lightning, and as brief
As summer-hail, that is a storm's relief.

His lips are open, since his mind
Delights in work his fingers find.
In that red arch I see a gate,
Where gracious Loves might pass in state.
Sure his white body were fit habitation
For a whole fairy population.

I can endure the blight of drought
And the black rigour of my wild,
But not the name of Beauty on his mouth
And not to see him with a child.

Flowers all natural sweet,
That women sell on baskets in the street,
Lose half their beauty in my eyes,
They are a huckster's merchandise.

Who offers, then, to buy from me
That natural service, my maternity?

Of all companions I would choose to shun
Such, whose blunt truths are like a bursting gun.

Search but those strains, you think so much excel,
Scan ev'ry verse, and try the numbers well:
You'll plainly see, in almost ev'ry line,
Distinguishing defects to prove them mine.

Kinder the enemy who must malign us,
Than the smug friend who will define us.