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Love's Alchemy
by John Donne
Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I,
Say, where his centric happiness doth lie.
I have loved, and got, and told,
But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,
I should not find that hidden mystery.
O ! 'tis imposture all ;
And as no chemic yet th' elixir got,
But glorifies his pregnant pot,
If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,
So, lovers dream a rich and long delight,
But get a winter-seeming summer's night.

Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day,
Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?
Ends love in this, that my man
Can be as happy as I can, if he can
Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play?
That loving wretch that swears,
'Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,
Which he in her angelic finds,
Would swear as justly, that he hears,
In that day's rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres.
Hope not for mind in women ; at their best,
Sweetness and wit they are, but mummy, possess'd.

The so-called music of the spheres was from Aristotle's conception of the planets being mounted on transparent solid spherical shells centered on the Earth. This archaic model was quite unwieldy and was totally displaced by universal gravitation in the 16th century. The "music" was supposed to be based on harmonic ratios of sphere sizes or something like that, not audible sound.

I think John Donn is most famous for his poem from which Hemingway took his title for his novel about the failed Spanish Revolution, For Whom the Bell Tolls:

No man is an island, unto himself
...
...
...
Send not to know for whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

The roots of the 'spheres' is far more ancient than Aristotle. Pythagoras is generally credited with the 'singing of the spheres' and the ddevelopment of musical octaves but he learned it in the Bardic University system administered by Abaris (means rabbi) the Druid. At that point this system was already in tatters and it had factions who called themselves by names we hear a lot about at places like Qumrun and Alexandria.

Check into why Plato's time would summarily end the life of any person in the know who gave the key to the Pentagon-dodecahedron.

A circle giving birth to a square.

Plato proved that the dodecahedron is one of only five regular solids, the others being the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, and the icosahedron (20 sides). His proof that there are only five cemented his mathematical reputation for all time. Socrates, Plato's teacher, was killed for questioning polytheism, not for knowing about geometry.

I think World-Mysteries has the illustration of a pentagon-dodecahedron - not just a pentagon or dodecahedron but a model of the Earth Energy Grid and the platelets or construction of our planet which the secret societies would keep hidden and to a large extent still do.

It is part of why the ancients built all the megaliths and Pyramids all over the world as the Masons still do to the extent that they built a stele in the middle of paved highway to tie in to the Oak Island Grid.

John Donne (1572-1631).

He was the most outstanding of the English Metaphysical Poets and a churchman famous for his spellbinding sermons.

Donne was born in London to a prominent Roman Catholic family but converted to Anglicanism during the 1590s. At the age of 11 he entered the University of Oxford, where he studied for three years. According to some accounts, he spent the next three years at the University of Cambridge but took no degree at either university. He began the study of law at Lincoln's Inn, London, in 1592, and he seemed destined for a legal or diplomatic career. Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Keeper of the Great Seal, in 1598. His secret marriage in 1601 to Egerton's niece, Anne More, resulted in his dismissal from this position and in a brief imprisonment. During the next few years Donne made a meager living as a lawyer.

Donne's principal literary accomplishments during this period were Divine Poems (1607) and the prose work Biathanatos (c. 1608, posthumously published 1644), a half-serious extenuation of suicides, in which he argued that suicide is not intrinsically sinful. Donne became a priest of the Anglican Church in 1615 and was appointed royal chaplain later that year. In 1621 he was named dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. He attained eminence as a preacher, delivering sermons that are regarded as the most brilliant and eloquent of his time.

Donne's poetry embraces a wide range of secular and religious subjects. He wrote cynical verse about inconstancy, poems about true love, Neoplatonic lyrics on the mystical union of lovers' souls and bodies and brilliant satires and hymns depicting his own spiritual struggles. The two "Anniversaries" - "An Anatomy of the World" (1611) and "Of the Progress of the Soul" (1612)--are elegies for 15-year-old Elizabeth Drury.

Whatever the subject, Donne's poems reveal the same characteristics that typified the work of the metaphysical poets: dazzling wordplay, often explicitly sexual; paradox; subtle argumentation; surprising contrasts; intricate psychological analysis; and striking imagery selected from nontraditional areas such as law, physiology, scholastic philosophy, and mathematics.

Donne's prose, almost equally metaphysical, ranks at least as high as his poetry. The Sermons, some 160 in all, are especially memorable for their imaginative explications of biblical passages and for their intense explorations of the themes of divine love and of the decay and resurrection of the body. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) is a powerful series of meditations, expostulations, and prayers in which Donne's serious sickness at the time becomes a microcosm wherein can be observed the stages of the world's spiritual disease.

Obsessed with the idea of death, Donne preached what was called his own funeral sermon, "Death's Duel" just a few weeks before he died in London on March 31, 1631.

Exerpt from: "Go and catch a falling star".

"Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair."