Lyric Poem · Love
Air And Angels
by John Donne
1Twice or thrice had I loved thee,
2Before I knew thy face or name,
3So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame,
4Angels affect us oft, and worship'd be;
5Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
6Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
7But since my soul, whose child love is,
8Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
9More subtile than the parent is,
10Love must not be, but take a body too,
11And therefore what thou wert, and who,
12I bid Love ask, and now
13That it assume thy body, I allow,
14And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.
15Whilst thus to ballast love, I thought,
16And so more steadily to have gone,
17With wares which would sink admiration,
18I saw, I had love's pinnace overfraught,
19Ev'ry thy hair for love to work upon
20Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
21For, nor in nothing, nor in things
22Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
23Then as an Angel, face, and wings
24Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
25So thy love may be my loves sphere;
26Just such disparity
27As is twixt Air and Angels' purity,
28'Twixt women's love, and men's will ever be.
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“Air And Angels” by John Donne — quilloak.com/poems/air-and-angels
Quick facts
- Poem
- Air And Angels
- Poet
- John Donne
- Length
- 28 lines
- Form
- Lyric Poem
- Themes
- Love, Peace, Childhood
Craft notes
How this poem works
Measured from the text on this page, not copied from a summary. Counts are approximate: syllables and rhymes come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which models General American English, so dialect, older pronunciation, and performance can all change what you hear.
- Shape
- 28 lines · 2 stanzas of 14 lines
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Text, source & rights
A traceable edition
Full-text display is based on the committed source record and a United States term-expiry review.
- Author record
- John Donne1572–1631
- Source record
- PoetryDBAir And Angels by john-donne, PoetryDB transcription
- Display decision
- Full text · United States · reviewed 2026-07-18
- Publication record
- Not recorded in the imported source
- Text fingerprint
- SHA-256 f2ef8af9a404c11e…
- Editorial handling
- Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.
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