By:  Unknown

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis, for object, strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.
 

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.
 

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixed;
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor let's them close;
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose.  [1]  
 

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant poles have placed
Though Love's whole world on us doth wheel,  [2]
Not by themselves to be embraced,
 

Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear,
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramped into a planisphere.  [3]

As lines, so loves oblique may well 
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours, so truly parallel,
Though infinitive, can never meet.

 

[1]  Defying fate

[2]  The relationship  (literally, the lines says)  Between us, forms the axis on which Love's world turns 

[3]  A sphere projected on a plane surface (i.e map or chart)  In the context possibly as plane projections on opposite sides of the world