Donne a Day 50 - A Valediction: of the Book (with intro!)

This poem of valediction is extravagant beyond belief. The speaker is encouraging his lady, in his absence, to write a book of their love, and he then imagines how this book will become the repository of all the world's learning, and also provides a kind of measure of their love itself. John Donne, a valediction of the book. I'll tell thee now, dear love, what thou shalt do to anger destiny, as she doth us. How I shall stay, though she alone me thus, and how posterity shall know it too. How thine may out-endure Sibyl's glory, and obscure her who from Pindar could allure, and her through whose help Lucan is not lame, and her whose book, they say, Homer did find and name. Study our manuscripts, those myriads of letters which have passed twixt thee and me. Thence write our annals, and in them will be, to all whom love's subliming fire invades, rule and example found. There, the faith of any ground, no schismatic will dare to wound, that sees how love this grace to us affords. To make, to keep, to use, to be, these his records. This book, as long lived as the elements, or as the world's form, this all-graved tome, in cipher-write, or new-made idiom. We for love's clergy only are instruments. When this book is made thus, should again the ravenous vandals and goths inundate us, learning were safe. In this our universe, schools might learn sciences, spheres, music, angels, verse. Here, love's divines, since all divinity is love or wonder, may find all they seek. Whether abstract spiritual love they like, their souls exhaled with what they do not see, or, loath so to amuse faith's infirmity, they choose something which they can see and use. For though mind be the heaven where love doth sit, beauty a convenient type may be to figure it. Here, more than in their books, may lawyers find, both by what titles mistresses are ours, and how prerogative those states devours, transferred from love himself to womankind, who though from heart and eyes they exact great subsidies, forsake him who on them relies, and for the cause honour or conscience give. Chimeras vain as they, or their prerogative. Here, statesmen, or of them they which can read, may of their occupation find the grounds. Love and their art alike, it deadly wounds if to consider what tis one proceed. In both they do excel, who the present govern well, whose weakness none doth or dares tell. In this thy book such will their nothing see, as in the Bible some can find out alchemy. Thus vent thy thoughts. Abroad I'll study thee, as hero moves far off that great heights takes. How great love is, presence best trial makes, but absence tries how long this love will be. To take a latitude, sun or stars are fitliest viewed at their brightest. But to conclude of longitudes, what other way have we but to mark when and where the dark eclipses be?