Death's Duel by John Donne

Upon The Death Of Doctor Donne Dean Of Paul's by Henry King

To have lived eminent in a degree
Beyond our loftiest flights, that is like thee;
Or t'have had too much merit is not safe;
For such excesses find no epitaph.
At common graves we have poetic eyes
Can melt themselves in easy elegies;
Each quill can drop his tributary verse,
And pin it with the hatchments, to the hearse:
But at thine, poem or inscription
(Rich soul of wit and language); we have none;
Indeed a silence does that tomb befit
Where is no herald left to blazon it.
Widowed invention justly doth forbear
To come abroad knowing thou art not here,
Late her great patron; whose prerogative
Maintained and clothed her so, as none alive
Must now presume to keep her at thy rate,
Though he the Indies for her dower estate:
Or else that awful fire, which once did burn
In thy clear brain, now fall'n into thy Urn.
Lives there to fright rude empirics from thence,
Which might profane thee by their ignorance:
Who ever writes of thee, and in a style
Unworthy such a theme, does but revile
Thy precious dust, and wake a learned spirit
Which may revenge his rapes upon thy merit.
For all a low-pitched fancy can devise,
Will prove at best but hallowed injuries.
Thou, like the dying swan, didst lately sing
Thy mournful dirge in audience of the King;
When pale looks, and faint accents of thy breath,
Presented so to life that piece of death,
That it was feared and prophesied by all
Thou thither cam'st to preach thy funeral.
O! hadst thou in an elegiac knell
Rung out unto the world thine own farewell;
And in thy high victorious numbers beat
The solemn measure of thy grieved retreat:
Thou might'st the Poets service now have missed,
As well as then thou didst prevent the priest:
And never to the world beholden be,
So much as for an epitaph for thee.
I do not like the office. Nor is't fit
Thou, who didst lend our age such sums of wit,
Should'st now reborrow from her bankrupt mine
That ore to bury thee, which once was thine.
Rather still leave us in thy debt; and know
(Exalted soul!) more glory 'tis to owe
Unto thy hearse what we can never pay,
Then with embased coin those Rites defray.
Commit we then thee to thy self: nor blame
Our drooping loves, which thus to thine own fame
Leave thee executor: since but thy own
No pen could do thee justice, nor bays crown
Thy vast desert; save that we nothing can
Depute to be thy ashes guardian.
So jewellers no art or metal trust
To form the diamond, but the diamonds dust.