Analysis of If love be holy, if that mystery

John Marston 1576 (Coventry) – 1634 (Hampshire)



If love be holy, if that mystery
O co-united hearts be sacrament;
If the unbounded goodness have infused
A sacred ardour of a mutual love
Into our species; if those amorous joys,
Those sweets of life, those comforts even in death,
Spring from a cause above our reason's reach;
If that clear flame deduce its heat from heaven,
'Tis, like its cause, eternal; always one,
As in th' instiller of divinest love,
Unchanged by time, immortal, maugre death.
But, oh! 'tis grown a figment; love, a jest:
A comic poesy: the soul of man is rotten,
Even to the core, no sound affection.
Our love is hollow, vaulted, stands on props
Of circumstance, profit, or ambitious passes.


Scheme ABCDEFGHHDFIHHJK
Poetic Form
Metre 1111011100 1101011100 1001010101 0101101001 011010111001 11111101001 1101011011 11110111110 111101011 10111111 011101011 1111010101 01010111110 1010111010 10111010111 11010101010
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 658
Words 119
Sentences 5
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 16
Lines Amount 16
Letters per line (avg) 32
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 514
Words per stanza (avg) 117
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

36 sec read
51

John Marston

John Marston was an English poet, playwright and satirist during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. His career as a writer lasted a decade, and his work is remembered for its energetic and often obscure style, its contributions to the development of a distinctively Jacobean style in poetry, and its idiosyncratic vocabulary. more…

All John Marston poems | John Marston Books

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