To the Countess of Salisbury, August 1614 by John Donne

Fair, great, and good, since seeing you we see What heaven can do, what any earth can be; Since now your beauty shines; now, when the sun, Grown stale, is to so low a value run, That his dishevell’d beams, and scatter’d fires Serve but for ladies’ periwigs and tires In lovers’ sonnets, you come to repair God’s book of creatures, teaching what is fair; Since now, when all is wither’d, shrunk, and dried, All virtues ebb’d out to a dead, low tide, All the world’s frame being crumbled into sand, Where every man thinks by himself to stand, Integrity, friendship, and confidence, Cements of greatness, being vapour’d hence, And narrow man being fill’d with little shares, Court, city, church are all shops of smallwares; All having blown to sparks their noble fire, And drawn their sound gold ingot into wire; All trying by a love of littleness To make abridgments, and to draw to less Even that nothing which at first we were; Since in these times your greatness doth appear, And that we learn by it, that man, to get Towards Him that’s infinite, must first be great: Since in an age so ill, as none is fit So much as to accuse, much less mend it —For who can judge, or witness of those times, Where all alike are guilty of the crimes? Where he that would be good, is thought by all A monster, or at best fantastical⁠— Since now you durst be good, and that I do Discern by daring to contemplate you, That there may be degrees of fair, great, good, Through your light, largeness, virtue, understood; If in this sacrifice of mine be shown Any small spark of these, call it your own And if things like these have been said by me Of others, call not that idolatry; For had God made man first, and man had seen The third day’s fruits and flowers, and various green, He might have said the best that he could say Of those fair creatures which were made that day; And when next day he had admired the birth Of sun, moon, stars, fairer than late-prais’d earth, He might have said the best that he could say, And not be chid for praising yesterday; So though some things are not together true, As, that another’s worthiest, and, that you; Yet, to say so, doth not condemn a man, If, when he spoke them, they were both true then. How fair a proof of this in our soul grows; We first have souls of growth and sense; and those, When our last soul, our soul immortal, came, Were swallow’d into it, and have no name. Nor doth he injure those souls, which doth cast The power and praise of both them on the last; No more do I wrong any, if I adore The same things now which I adored before, The subject changed, and measure; the same thing In a low constable, and in the king I reverence, his power to work on me So did I humbly reverence each degree Of fair, great, good, but more, now I am come From having found their walks, to find their home. And as I owe my first souls thanks, that they For my last soul did fit and mould my clay, So am I debtor unto them, whose worth Enabled me to profit, and take forth This new great lesson, thus to study you; Which none, not reading others first, could do. Nor lack I light to read this book, though I In a dark cave, yea, in a grave do lie; For as your fellow-angels, so you do Illustrate them who come to study you. The first whom we in histories do find To have profess’d all arts, was one born blind; He lack’d those eyes beasts have as well as we, Not those by which angels are seen and see. So, though I’m born without those eyes to live, Which fortune, who hath none herself, doth give, Which are fit means to see bright courts and you, Yet, may I see you thus, as now I do, I shall by that all goodness have discern’d, And though I burn my library, be learn’d.