Against Thoughts

Intolerable racks!
Distend my soul no more,
Loud as the billows when they roar,
More dreadful than the hideous thunder-cracks.
Foes inappeasable, that slay
My best contents, around me stand,
Each like a Fury, with a torch in hand;
And fright me from the hopes of one good day.

When I seclude myself, and say
How frolic will I be,
Unfetter'd from my company
I'll bathe me in felicity!
In come these guests,
Which Harpy-like defile my feasts:
Oh the damn'd dialogues, the cursèd talk
'Twixt us (my Thoughts) along a sullen walk.

You, like the poisonous wine
The gallants quaff
To make 'em laugh,
And yet at last endure
From thence the tortures of a calenture,
Fool me with feign'd refections, till I lie
Stark raving in a Bedlam ecstasy.

Do I dread
The starry Throne and Majesty
Of that high God,
Who batters kingdoms with an iron rod,
And makes the mountains stagger with a nod?
That sits upon the glorious Bow,
Smiling at changes here below.
These goad me to his grand tribunal, where
They tell me I with horror must appear,
And antedate amazements by grim fear.

Would I descry
Those happy souls' blest mansions 'bove the sky,
Invisible by mortal eye,
And in a noble speculation trace
A journey to that shining place;
Can I afford a sigh or two,
Or breathe a wish that I might thither go:
These clip my plumes, and chill my blazing love
That, O, I cannot, cannot soar above.

The fire that shines
In subterranean mines,
The crystall'd streams,
The sulphur rocks that glow upon
The torrid banks of Phlegeton;
Those sooty fiends which Nature keeps,
Bolted and barr'd up in the deeps;
Black caves, wide chasms, which who see confess
Types of the pit, so deep, so bottomless!
These mysteries, though I fain would not behold,
You to my view unfold:
Like an old Roman criminal, to the high
Tarpeian Hill you force me up, that I
May so be hurried headlong down, and die.

Mention not then
The strength and faculties of men;
Whose arts cannot expel
These anguishes, this bosom-Hell.
When down my aching head I lay,
In hopes to slumber them away;
Perchance I do beguile
The tyranny awhile,
One or two minutes, then they throng again,
And reassault me with a trebled pain:
Nay, though I sob in fetters, they
Spare me not then; perplex me each sad day,
And whom a very Turk would pity, slay.

Hence, hence, my Jailors! Thoughts be gone,
Let my tranquillities alone.
Shall I embrace
A crocodile, or place
My choice affections on the fatal dart,
That stabs me to the heart?
I hate your curst proximity,
Worse than the venom'd arrows-heads that be
Cramm'd in the quivers of my Destiny.