John Donne : At the Round Earths Imagin'd Corners

[Portable Poetry ...poems for your pocket]

[The book printer - Amman]

John Donne : At the Round Earths Imagin'd Corners

At the round earth's imagin'd corners¹, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattred² bodies goe,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose
	eyes,
Shall behold God, and never tast deaths woe,
But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space,
For, if above all these, my sinnes abound,
'Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,
When wee are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach mee how to repent; for that's as good
As if thou'hadst seal'd my pardon, with thy blood.

John Donne (1572-1631)	P. 1633

FOOTNOTES

¹ the first line is a reference to the Book of Revelations - "...I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth..."; ² scattered (referring to the day of the Last Judgement)

If you came here from the main Poems page, the BACK button on your web browser will bring you back there

Note 1: When we convert poems to HTML (WEB) format for viewing here, some modifications may occur to the formatting (e.g. indenting) - all poems are correctly formatted for print.

Note 2: if you came to this page following a search engine query, you can find the Portable Poetry home page at www.portablepoetry.com.

Note 3: Feel free to copy these poems and footnotes for your personal and private use. For other uses please get in touch with us first. This poem is believed to be in the public domain. All footnotes are copyright Portable Poetry.