Death and Mourning

O lente, lente currite noctis equi: 7 [Slowly, slowly run, O horses of the night:] The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The Devil will come, and Faustus must be damned. O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down? See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul—half a drop: ah, my Christ!

Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer, Conspired against our God with Lucifer, And are forever damned with Lucifer.

The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death.

O! that this too too solid 30 flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew; Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world.

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

But yesterday the word of Caesar might Have stood against the world; now lies he there, And none so poor to do him reverence.

What! will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?

All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? What! all my pretty chickens and their dam At one fell swoop?

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men, And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.

All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair, law, chance, hath slain.

She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Sweetest love, I do not go, For weariness of thee, Nor in hope the world can show A fitter love for me; But since that I Must die at last, ’tis best, To use my self in jest Thus by feign’d deaths to die.

An old man, broken with the storms of state, Is come to lay his weary bones among ye; Give him a little earth for charity.

Unarm, Eros; the long day’s task is done, And we must sleep.

My race of glory run, and race of shame, And I shall shortly be with them at rest.

Not that fair field Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world.

So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life.

As long as skies are blue, and fields are green, Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.

What! alive, and so bold, O earth?

Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.

Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!

The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober coloring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night; Envy and calumny and hate and pain, And that unrest which men miscall delight Can touch him not and torture not again; From the contagion of the world’s slow stain He is secure, and now can never mourn A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain.