Read "Farewell to Love" by John Donne online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Whilst yet to prove / I thought there was some deity in love, / So did I reverence, and gave / Worship; as atheists at their dying hour / Call, what they cannot name, an unknown power, / As ignorantly did I crave. / Thus when / Things not yet known are coveted by men, / Our desires give them fashion, and so / As they wax lesser, fall, as they size, grow.
But, from late fair, / His highness sitting in a golden chair / Is not less cared for after three days / By children, than the thing which lovers so / Blindly admire, and with such worship woo; / Being had, enjoying it decays; / And thence, / What before pleased them all, takes but one sense, / And that so lamely, as it leaves behind / A kind of sorrowing dullness to the mind.