The Autumnal by John Donne — Read

No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace / As I have seen in one autumnal face; / Young beauties force our love, and that's a rape; / This doth but counsel, yet you cannot scape. / If 'twere a shame to love, here 'twere no shame; / Affections here take reverence's name. / Were her first years the Golden Age? that's true, / But now they're gold oft tried, and ever new. / That was her torrid and inflaming time; / This is her tolerable tropic clime. / Fair eyes; who asks more heat than comes from hence, / He in a fever wishes pestilence. / Call not these wrinkles, graves; if graves they were, / They were Love's graves, for else he is nowhere. / Yet lies not Love dead here, but here doth sit, / Vow'd to this trench, like an anachorite, / And here, till hers, which must be his death, come, / He doth not dig a grave, but build a tomb. / Here dwells he; though he sojourn everywhere / In progress, yet his standing house is here; / Here, where still evening is, not noon, nor night; / Where no voluptuousness, yet all delight. / In all her words, unto all hearers fit, / You may at revels, you at council, sit. / This is love's timber; youth his underwood; / There he, as wine in June, enrages blood; / Which then comes seasonablest, when our taste / And appetite to other things is past. / Xerxes' strange Lydian love, the platane tree, / Was loved for age, none being so large as she; / Or else because, being young, nature did bless / Her youth with age's glory, barrenness. / If we love things long sought, age is a thing / Which we are fifty years in compassing; / If transitory things, which soon decay, / Age must be loveliest at the latest day. / But name not winter faces, whose skin's slack, / Lank as an unthrift's purse, but a soul's sack; / Whose eyes seek light within, for all here's shade; / Whose mouths are holes, rather worn out, than made; / Whose every tooth to a several place is gone, / To vex their souls at resurrection; / Name not these living death-heads unto me, / For these, not ancient, but antique be. / I hate extremes; yet I had rather stay / With tombs than cradles, to wear out a day. / Since such love's motion natural is, may still / My love descend, and journey down the hill, / Not panting after growing beauties; so / I shall ebb out with them who homeward go.