The Hecatomb to his Mistresse

Be dumb ye beggers of the rhiming trade,
Geld your loose wits, and let your Muse be splaid.
Charge not the parish with your bastard phrase
Of Balm, Elixar, both the Indias,
Of shrine, saint, sacriledge, and such as these
Expressions, common as your Mistresses.
Hence ye fantastick Postillers in song,
My text defeats your art, ties natures tongue,
Scorns all her tinsil'd metaphors of pelf,
Illustrated by nothing but her self
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 Panegyrick line.
Reach then a soaring Quill that I may write,
As with a Jacobs staff to take her height.
Suppose an Angel darting through the air,
Should there encounter a religious prayer
Mounting to Heaven, that Intelligence
Should for a Sunday-suit thy breath condense
Into a body. Let me crack a string
In ventring higher; were the note I sing
Above heavens Ela , should I then decline,
And with a deep-mouth'd Gammut sound the Line
From pole to pole, I could not reach her worth,
Nor find an Epithet to set it forth.
Mettals may blazon common beauties, she
Makes pearls and planets humble herauldy.
As then a purer substance is defin'd
But by an heap of Negatives combin'd;
Ask what a spirit is, you'l hear them crie
It hath no matter, no mortalitie:
So can I not define how sweet, how fair,
Onely 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 Almanacks mishap'd Anatomie,
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 name-sake signs in their strange character.
As the Philosophers to every Sence
Marry its object, yet with some dispence,
And grant them a polygamie withal,
And these their common Sensibles they call:
So is't with her who, stinted unto none,
Unites all Sences in each action.
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-tun'd face, such moving Rhetorick?
Doth not each look a flash of light'ning feel
Which spares the bodies sheath, yet melts the steel?
Thy soul must needs confess, or grant thy sence
Corrupted with the objects excellence.
Sweet Magick, which can make five sences lye
Conjur'd within the circle of an eye.
In whom, since all the Five are intermixt,
Oh now that Scaliger would prove his sixt.
Thou man of mouth, that canst not name a She
Unless all nature pay a Subsidie,
Whose language is a Tax, whose Musk-cat verse
Voids nought but flowers, for thy Muses herse
Fitter than Celia 's looks, who in a trice
Canst state the long disputed Paradice,
And (what Divines hunt with so cold a sent)
Canst in her bosom find it resident.
Now come aloft, come, come and breath a vein,
And give some vent unto thy daring strain.
Say the Astrologer, who spells the Stars,
In that fair Alphabet reads Peace and Wars,
Mistakes his Globe, and in her brighter eye
Interprets Heavens phisiognomy.
Call her the Metaphysicks of her Sex,
And say she tortures wits, as Quartans vex
Physitians; call her the Square Circle , say
She is the very rule of Algebra .
What ere thou understand'st not, say't of her,
For that's the way to write her Character.
Say this and more, and when thou hop'st to raise
Thy fansie so as to inclose her praise,
Alas poor Gotham with thy Cookko hedge,
Hyperboles are here but sacriledge.
Then roll up Muse, what thou hast ravel'd out,
Some comments clear not, but increase the doubt.
She that affords poor mortals not a glance
Of knowledge, but is known by ignorance,
She that commits a rape on every sence,
Whose breath can countermaund a pestilence,
She that can strike the best invention dead,
Till bafled Poetry hangs down her head,
She, she it is that doth contain all bliss,
And makes the world but her Periphrasis.
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