On a Girdle
Edmund Waller · 1645
Public domain
From The Golden Treasury, selected by Francis Turner Palgrave. Edmund Waller. The text is free of copyright in the United States. This copy is the poem, without the Project Gutenberg header.
That which her slender waist confined
Shall now my joyful temples bind:
No monarch but would give his crown
His arms might do what this has done.
It was my Heaven's extremest sphere,
The pale which held that lovely deer:
My joy, my grief, my hope, my love
Did all within this circle move.
A narrow compass! and yet there
Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair:
Give me but what this ribband bound,
Take all the rest the Sun goes round.