Read "Air and Angels" by John Donne online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Twice or thrice had I loved thee, / Before I knew thy face or name; / So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, / Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be. / Still when, to where thou wert, I came, / Some lovely glorious nothing did I see. / But since my soul, whose child love is, / Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do, / More subtle than the parent is / Love must not be, but take a body too; / And therefore what thou wert, and who, / I bid love ask, and now / That it assume thy body, I allow, / And fix itself in thy lips, eyes, and brow.
Whilst thus to ballast love I thought, / And so more steadily to have gone, / With wares which would sink admiration, / I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught; / Thy every hair for love to work upon / Is much too much; some fitter must be sought; / For, nor in nothing, nor in things / Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere; / Then as an angel face and wings / Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear, / So thy love may be my love's sphere; / Just such disparity / As is 'twixt air's and angels' purity, / 'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.