Selected Poems by John Donne

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‘Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I,’ – For many love is the pinnacle of enlightenment. The speaker’s imagination naturally turns downward to dig a mine.

‘Say, where his centric happiness doth lie.’ – The centre of love (like the centre of the earth). The ‘centre’ of a universe conceived of as concentric circles of purer and purer matter was also the Stone or Elixir, the great pursuit of the alchemists.

‘I have loved, and got, and told,’ – This presumably means ‘I have loved a woman, possessed her, then written poems about her,’ but the real interest here is the weariness of the speaker’s tone. He sounds tired of the whole business of love.

‘O ! 'tis imposture all;’ – a very common – and understandable - judgement on love as well as alchemy.

‘And as no chemic yet th’elixir got,’ – ‘chemic’ = alchemist.

‘But glorifies his pregnant pot,/If by the way to him befall/Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,’ – The alchemist is regarded as happy if he has produced a useful by-product, like a perfume or medicine.

‘So, lovers dream a rich and long delight,/But get a winter-seeming summer's night.’ – Just as the alchemist must make do with his perfume instead of the Elixir, lovers only get a short ‘summer night’ of pleasure, which is not even without the chills and emotional cold of a ‘winter’ one.

‘Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day,/Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?’ – as in The Canonization , love takes away pleasure, money, social status and even shortens life (‘our day’ probably implying ‘our day of life’).

‘Ends love in this, that my man/Can be as happy as I can, if he can/Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play?’ – The speaker’s ‘man’ is his servant, who may enjoy married love if he but endures the embarrassment of a ‘bridegroom’s play,’ which was a wild and boisterous celebration just prior to a wedding in which the groom was insulted and mocked.