For my first twenty years, since yesterday,
I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away,
For forty more I fed on favours past,
And forty on hopes, that thou wouldst they might last;
Tears drown’d one hundred, and sighs blew out two;
A thousand, I did neither think, nor do,
Or not divide, all being one thought of you;
Or in a thousand more, forgot that too.
Yet call not this long life; but think that I
Am, by being dead, immortal; can ghosts die?
Public-domain source text
The Computation
by John Donne
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