Be dumb, you beggars of the rhyming trade, Geld your loose wits and let your Muse be spayed. Charge not the parish with the bastard phrase Of balm, elixir, both the Indias, Of shrine, saint, sacrilege, and such as these Expressions common as your mistresses. Hence, you fantastic postillers in song. My text defeats your art, ties Nature's tongue, Scorns all her tinselled metaphors of pelf, Illustrated by nothing but herself. 10 As spiders travel by their bowels spun Into a thread, and, when the race is run, Wind up their journey in a living clew, So is it with my poetry and you. From your own essence must I first untwine, Then twist again each panegyric line. Reach then a soaring quill that I may write, As with a Jacob's staff, to take her height. Suppose an angel, darting through the air, Should there encounter a religious prayer 20 Mounting to Heaven, that Intelligence Should for a Sunday-suit thy breath condense Into a body.--Let me crack a string In venturing higher; were the note I sing Above Heaven's Ela, should I then decline, And with a deep-mouthed gamut sound the line From pole to pole, I could not reach her worth, Nor find an epithet to set it forth. Metals may blazon common beauties; she Makes pearls and planets humble heraldry. 30 As, then, a purer substance is defined But by a heap of negatives combined, Ask what a spirit is, you'll hear them cry It hath no matter, no mortality: So can I not define how sweet, how fair; Only I say she 's not as others are. For what perfections we to others grant, It is her sole perfection to want. All other forms seem in respect of thee The almanac's misshaped anatomy, 40 Where Aries head and face, Bull neck and throat, The Scorpion gives the secrets, knees the Goat; A brief of limbs foul as those beasts, or are Their namesake signs in their strange character. As the philosophers to every sense Marry its object, yet with some dispense, And grant them a polygamy with all, And these their common sensibles they call: So is 't with her who, stinted unto none, Unites all senses in each action. 50 The same beam heats and lights; to see her well Is both to hear and feel, to taste and smell. For, can you want a palate in your eyes, When each of hers contains a double prize, Venus's apple? Can your eyes want nose When from each cheek buds forth a fragrant rose? Or can your sight be deaf to such a quick And well-tuned face, such moving rhetoric? Doth not each look a flash of lightning feel Which spares the body's sheath, and melts the steel? 60 Thy soul must needs confess, or grant thy sense Corrupted with the object's excellence. Sweet magic, which can make five senses lie Conjured within the circle of an eye!