Years And Years

15 Ramadhan, 1439

The astonishing, egotistical, manic ambition of John Donne can still take one's breath away, some forty-six years after first encountering it: Let us love nobly, and live, and add again / Years and years unto years... In a poem that begins All kings, and is riven through with images of the poet and his beloved as royal beings, there's not much doubt about how JD imagines loving, and living, nobly.

I'm not sure either myself or the Missus imagine ourselves as any kind of royalty. But we have managed to keep things going for some fair few years now, as this day of days serves to remind us, and that's enough - indeed, more than enough.