The world's contracted thus

Donne is in my head today. As in “The Sun Rising,” this poem describes being in love as a contraction of the world to the experience of the lovers, or an expansion of the lovers to fill or obliterate the world. Love is a world, and “makes one little room, an everywhere.” This is apt for the towering, obsessive, almost destructive love of Shakespeare’s sonnets or some of Donne’s early work, but I think it also fits the quiet, steadfast love of a life lived in “one little room,” as John and Ann Donne's was - needing nothing else, because “nothing else is.” It fits both love's annexing and love's foreswearing of the world. This is “The Good Morrow.”

I wonder, by my truth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved; were we not weaned till then,
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess our world; each hath one and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp North, without declining West?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one; or thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.