Love's Progress by John Donne

Whoever loves, if he do not propose / The right true end of love, he's one that goes / To sea for nothing but to make him sick. / Love is a bear-whelp born; if we o'er-lick / Our love, and force it new strange shapes to take, / We err, and of a lump a monster make. / Were not a calf a monster, that were grown / Faced like a man, though better than his own? / Perfection is in unity; prefer / One woman first, and then one thing in her. / I, when I value gold, may think upon / The ductileness, the application, / The wholesomeness, the ingenuity, / From rust, from soil, from fire ever free; / But if I love it, 'tis because 'tis made / By our new nature, use, the soul of trade. / All this in women we might think upon, / -If women had them-and yet love but one. / Can men more injure women than to say / They love them for that, by which they're not they? / Makes virtue woman? must I cool my blood / Till I both be, and find one wise and good? / May barren angels love so. But if we / Make love to woman, virtue is not she, / As beauty is not, nor wealth. He that strays thus / From her to hers is more adulterous / Than if he took her maid. Search every sphere / And firmament, our Cupid is not there. / He's an infernal God, and underground / With Pluto dwells, where gold and fire abound. / Men to such gods their sacrificing coals / Did not on altars lay, but pits and holes. / Although we see celestial bodies move / Above the earth, the earth we till and love. / So we her airs contemplate, words and heart, / And virtues, but we love the centric part.

Nor is the soul more worthy, or more fit / For love, than this, as infinite as it. / But in attaining this desired place / How much they err, that set out at the face? / The hair a forest is of ambushes, / Of springes, snares, fetters, and manacles; / The brow becalms us when 'tis smooth and plain, / And when 'tis wrinkled, shipwrecks us again; / Smooth, 'tis a paradise, where we would have / Immortal stay, but wrinkled 'tis a grave. / The nose, like to the first meridian, runs / Not 'twixt an east and west, but 'twixt two suns; / It leaves a cheek, a rosy hemisphere, / On either side, and then directs us where / Upon the islands fortunate we fall, / Not faint Canaries, but ambrosial, / Her swelling lips, to which when we are come, / We anchor there, and think ourselves at home, / For they seem all; there Siren's songs and there / Wise Delphic oracles do fill the ear. / There, in a creek where chosen pearls do swell, / The remora, her cleaving tongue, doth dwell. / These and the glorious promontory, her chin, / O'erpast, and the straight Hellespont between / The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts, / Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests, / Succeeds a boundless sea, but yet thine eye / Some island moles may scattered there descry; / And sailing towards her India, in that way / Shall at her fair Atlantic navel stay. / Though there the current be the pilot made, / Yet, ere thou be where thou shouldst be embay'd, / Thou shalt upon another forest set, / Where many shipwreck, and no further get. / When thou art there, consider what this chase / Misspent by thy beginning at the face.