Part 3

Lines 225–330

225 'O then advance of yours that phraseless hand,
226 Whose white weighs down the airy scale of praise;
227 Take all these similes to your own command,
228 Hallow'd with sighs that burning lungs did raise;
229 What me your minister, for you obeys,
230 Works under you; and to your audit comes
231 Their distract parcels in combined sums.
232 'Lo! this device was sent me from a nun,
233 Or sister sanctified of holiest note;
234 Which late her noble suit in court did shun,
235 Whose rarest havings made the blossoms dote;
236 For she was sought by spirits of richest coat,
237 But kept cold distance, and did thence remove
238 To spend her living in eternal love.
239 'But O, my sweet, what labour is't to leave
240 The thing we have not, mastering what not strives?
241 Paling the place which did no form receive,
242 Playing patient sports in unconstrained gyves:
243 She that her fame so to herself contrives,
244 The scars of battle 'scapeth by the flight,
245 And makes her absence valiant, not her might.
246 'O pardon me, in that my boast is true:
247 The accident which brought me to her eye,
248 Upon the moment did her force subdue,
249 And now she would the caged cloister fly:
250 Religious love put out religion's eye:
251 Not to be tempted, would she be immur'd,
252 And now, to tempt all, liberty procur'd.
253 'How mighty then you are, O hear me tell!
254 The broken bosoms that to me belong
255 Have emptied all their fountains in my well,
256 And mine I pour your ocean all among:
257 I strong o'er them, and you o'er me being strong,
258 Must for your victory us all congest,
259 As compound love to physic your cold breast.
260 'My parts had pow'r to charm a sacred nun,
261 Who, disciplin'd and dieted in grace,
262 Believ'd her eyes when they t oassail begun,
263 All vows and consecrations giving place.
264 O most potential love! vow, bond, nor space,
265 In thee hath neither sting, knot, nor confine,
266 For thou art all, and all things else are thine.
267 'When thou impressest, what are precepts worth
268 Of stale example? When thou wilt inflame,
269 How coldly those impediments stand forth,
270 Of wealth, of filial fear, law, kindred, fame!
271 Love's arms are peace, 'gainst rule, 'gainst sense, 'gainst
272 shame.
273 And sweetens, in the suffering pangs it bears,
274 The aloes of all forces, shocks and fears.
275 'Now all these hearts that do on mine depend,
276 Feeling it break, with bleeding groans they pine,
277 And supplicant their sighs to your extend,
278 To leave the battery that you make 'gainst mine,
279 Lending soft audience to my sweet design,
280 And credent soul to that strong-bonded oath,
281 That shall prefer and undertake my troth.
282 'This said, his watery eyes he did dismount,
283 Whose sights till then were levell'd on my face;
284 Each cheek a river running from a fount
285 With brinish current downward flow'd apace:
286 O, how the channel to the stream gave grace!
287 Who, glaz'd with crystal, gate the glowing roses
288 That flame through water which their hue encloses.
289 'O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies
290 In the small orb of one particular tear!
291 But with the inundation of the eyes
292 What rocky heart to water will not wear?
293 What breast so cold that is not warmed here?
294 O cleft effect! cold modesty, hot wrath,
295 Both fire from hence and chill extincture hath.
296 'For lo! his passion, but an art of craft,
297 Even there resolv'd my reason into tears;
298 There my white stole of chastity I daff'd,
299 Shook off my sober guards, and civil fears;
300 Appear to him, as he to me appears,
301 All melting; though our drops this difference bore:
302 His poison'd me, and mine did him restore.
303 'In him a plenitude of subtle matter,
304 Applied to cautels, all strange forms receives,
305 Of burning blushes or of weeping water,
306 Or swooning paleness; and he takes and leaves,
307 In either's aptness, as it best deceives,
308 To blush at speeches rank, to weep at woes,
309 Or to turn white and swoon at tragic shows;
310 'That not a heart which in his level came
311 Could scape the hail of his all-hurting aim,
312 Showing fair nature is both kind and tame;
313 And, veil'd in them, did win whom he would maim:
314 Against the thing he sought he would exclaim;
315 When he most burned in heart-wish'd luxury,
316 He preach'd pure maid and prais'd cold chastity.
317 'Thus merely with the garment of a Grace
318 The naked and concealed fiend he cover'd,
319 That the unexperienc'd gave the tempter place,
320 Which, like a cherubin, above them hover'd.
321 Who, young and simple, would not be so lover'd?
322 Ay me! I fell, and yet do question make
323 What I should do again for such a sake.
324 'O, that infected moisture of his eye,
325 O, that false fire which in his cheek so glow'd,
326 O, that forc'd thunder from his heart did fly,
327 O, that sad breath his spongy lungs bestow'd,
328 O, all that borrow'd motion, seeming ow'd,
329 Would yet again betray the fore-betray'd,
330 And new pervert a reconciled maid.'

Notes

TLN 225archaic vocab
“advance of yours that phraseless hand”
'Advance' means 'hold out' or 'raise up'; 'phraseless' means beyond any words to describe it — the young man tells the maid her hand is so beautiful it defeats all praise. The stanza then extends a commercial metaphor: what all his other admirers gave him ('similes,' sighs, devotion) is 'distract parcels' — separate account-items — that he sums up and pays over to her 'audit,' her reckoning.
TLN 232cultural context
“this device was sent me from a nun”
The young man produces a love-token ('device') sent to him by a 'sister sanctified' — a consecrated religious woman, almost certainly a member of a convent, who had rejected many wealthy suitors to enter eternal religious life but who, seeing him, fell in love anyway. He uses her surrender as proof of his irresistible power.
TLN 242archaic vocab
“Playing patient sports in unconstrained gyves”
'Gyves' (pronounced 'jives') are leg-shackles or fetters — chains for a prisoner. 'Unconstrained gyves' is a deliberate paradox: the nun wears her chastity-vow like chains that are somehow not forced on her, since she chose them willingly. The seducer's point is that keeping a vow you've never been tempted to break takes no real courage.
TLN 250wordplay
“Religious love put out religion's eye”
The line turns on a pun: 'religious love' is both the nun's sacred devotion to God and the passionate new love she feels for the young man — which has blinded ('put out the eye of') her original religious faith. Sight was the conventional channel of falling in love in Renaissance poetry, so 'put out the eye' also means love literally displaced the faculty of spiritual discernment.
TLN 259archaic vocab
“compound love to physic your cold breast”
'Physic' means medicine or cure; 'congest' (TLN 258) means to gather together, heap up. The young man tells the maid that all the broken-hearted lovers he has conquered together flow into him, and he pours them all into her: the combined mass of their love is a 'compound' medicine that will warm her cold, unfeeling heart.
TLN 264archaic vocab
“O most potential love! vow, bond, nor space”
'Potential' here does not mean 'possible' (the modern sense) but 'powerful, mighty' — from Latin potens, having power. The young man apostrophizes Love as all-powerful: no vow, no obligation ('bond'), no distance ('space') can restrain it, for Love contains everything and everything else belongs to it.
TLN 274archaic vocab
“The aloes of all forces, shocks and fears”
'Aloes' was an intensely bitter medicinal plant-juice, proverbially the bitterest thing imaginable, used in Elizabethan medicine as a purgative. Love, the stanza says, sweetens even the bitterest hardships — the sting, the shocks, the fear — that it forces its victims to endure.
TLN 298archaic vocab
“my white stole of chastity I daff'd”
'Daff'd' means 'doffed' — took off, discarded. A 'stole' is a long liturgical vestment worn by priests and religious persons, a garment of office and holiness. The maid says she stripped away her chastity as if pulling off a sacred robe — she yielded to the young man and abandoned her virtue.
TLN 304archaic vocab
“Applied to cautels, all strange forms receives”
'Cautels' are deceitful tricks or crafty stratagems — the word comes from Latin cautela (caution, cunning). The maid now sees the young man's 'plenitude of subtle matter' — his store of clever artifice — for what it was: he could adopt any outward form (blushing, weeping, turning pale) as the occasion demanded for maximum deceptive effect.
TLN 324rhetorical device
“O, that infected moisture of his eye”
The poem's final stanza (the maid's last words) repeats 'O, that...' five times at the start of each line — a figure called anaphora. Rather than being a simple lament, each clause ends with a devastating twist: the infected tears, the false fire, the forced thunder, the spongy lungs, all this 'borrow'd motion, seeming ow'd' — would, she says, betray her again. She knows it was all false, and admits she would fall for it once more.
historical The female-complaint tradition