{
 "id": "john-donne/xii",
 "title": "XII",
 "ordinal": null,
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "John Donne",
 "poet_slug": "john-donne",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Poems, by J. D. with Elegies on the Authors Death",
 "book_slug": "poems-1633",
 "book_kind": "volume",
 "sequence": 4,
 "container": "Holy Sonnets",
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1633,
  "venue": "Poems, by J. D. with Elegies on the Authors Death (1633)",
  "note": "First located printing is this volume; an earlier periodical printing has not been established.",
  "uncertain": false,
  "sources": [
   "https://archive.org/details/donnepoems"
  ]
 },
 "source": {
  "kind": "standard-ebooks",
  "repo": "standardebooks/john-donne_poetry",
  "file": "divine-poems.xhtml",
  "upstream": [
   "https://archive.org/details/poemsofjohndonne01donn_1",
   "https://archive.org/details/poemswithelegie00chamgoog",
   "https://archive.org/details/poemswithelegie01chamgoog"
  ],
  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
 },
 "verification": {
  "level": "structural-only",
  "last_checked": "2026-08-12"
 },
 "stats": {
  "n_lines": 14,
  "n_stanzas": 1,
  "n_parts": 0,
  "longest_line_chars": 49,
  "max_indent": 0
 },
 "site_ready": true,
 "parts": [],
 "stanzas": [
  [
   {
    "text": "Why are we by all creatures waited on?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Why do the prodigal elements supply",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Life and food to me, being more pure than I,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Simpler and further from corruption?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Why brook’st thou, ignorant horse, subjection?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Why dost thou, bull and boar, so sillily",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Dissemble weakness, and by one man’s stroke die,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Whose whole kind you might swallow and feed upon?",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Weaker I am, woe’s me, and worse than you;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "You have not sinn’d, nor need be timorous.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "But wonder at a greater, for to us",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Created nature doth these things subdue;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "But their Creator, whom sin, nor nature tied,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "For us, His creatures, and His foes, hath died.",
    "indent": 0
   }
  ]
 ]
}