By John Donne
Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,
Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is,
Love must not be, but take a body too;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid love ask, and now
That it assume thy body I allow,
And fix itself to thy lip, eye, and brow.
Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught
Every thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere.
Then as an angel, face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere.
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air and angel's purity,
'Twixt women's love and men's will ever be.
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I had so much fun on Monday that I had a huge amount of work to do Tuesday. Some of this was on the computer and some of it was physical, since we are cleaning up Daniel's room so that our niece Maddy can move into it in a couple of weeks; I carried lots of things back and forth between the basement and the top floor, and finally Freecycled the papasan and ottoman we've had since we lived in Chicago, bought at the Pier 1 in Hyde Park before Daniel was born and well beloved by our cats.
It was a bit warmer than Monday but still nice enough to have the windows and doors open most of the day. We saw bunnies and chipmunks, though not many people had flags out for Flag Day. We watched a couple of episodes of Bones including "The Princess and the Pear" -- the nerd-convention Excalibur sword one -- and now we're watching Daniel Radcliffe on Colbert. Here are some photos of the Asian garden at the Glen Burnie mansion created by the founder of the Museum of the Shenandoah:
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