If you from spoil of th’ old world’s farthest end To the new world your kindled valours bend, What brave examples then do prove it true That one thing’s end doth still begin a new.
Where this text comes from
First published in Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's (London, William Heinemann, 1899), vol. I, p. 47, as “Calis and Guyana”. Not in any of the old editions of the Poems. Gosse prints it from the Westmoreland MS. in his account of the Cadiz expedition; the page is on the scan. Grierson's 1912 edition also takes its text from that manuscript and records that the Westmoreland epigrams had already been printed by Gosse. [1] [2]
Structure read from the source's markup; the words have not been compared against a page scan. Last checked 2026-08-12.
Taken from Standard Ebooks, standardebooks/john-donne_poetry, epigrams.xhtml. Rights: public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931).
Earlier sources (3)
This poem as JSON or plain text . Line anchors #L1–#L4.
Cite this poem
John Donne (1572–1631).
“Cales and Guyana.” First published in Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's (London, William Heinemann, 1899), vol. I, p. 47, as “Calis and Guyana”.
Text: Poem Index, https://poemindex.org/john-donne/cales-and-guyana/.
Append #L14 to cite line 14, or #L4-L9 for lines 4–9.
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