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Poetry · Poem

The Ecstasy

John DonneSeventeenth-century EnglishPoem
SOURCE TEXT · English original
WHERE, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swell’d up, to rest
The violet’s reclining head,
Sat we two, one another’s best.

Our hands were firmly cèmented
By a fast balm which thence did spring;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string.

So to engraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one;
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.

As ’twixt two equal armies Fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls—which to advance their state
Were gone out—hung ’twixt her and me.

And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay;
All day the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day.
Cultural reading

Reading the poem

Two lovers sit motionless on a violet-topped bank with hands cemented and eye-beams threaded together while their souls go out to negotiate between them, and the text stops with the pair lying silent like tomb statues all day.

Language notes

Text and edition

The supplied text breaks off while the souls are still negotiating and the lovers lie silent, before the ecstasy named in the title is unfolded, so it is a bounded anthology extract.