Death and Mourning

A mere anatomy, a mountebank, A threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller, A needy, hollow-ey’d, sharp-looking wretch, A living-dead man.

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damned perpetually! Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven, That time may cease, and midnight never come.

For if he like a madman lived, At least he like a wise one died.

O soul, be changed into little waterdrops, And fall into the ocean—ne’er to be found. My God! my God! look not so fierce on me!

Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.

Will I set up my everlasting rest, And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last embrace!

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.

Come away, come away, death, And in sad cypress let me be laid; Fly away, fly away, breath; I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

With one auspicious and one dropping eye, With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole.

He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a grass-green turf At his heels a stone.

Hang there like fruit, my soul, Till the tree die!

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.

I am dying, Egypt, dying; only I here importune death awhile, until Of many thousand kisses the poor last I lay upon thy lips.

I have Immortal longings in me.

It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman, Which gives the stern’st good-night.

Let’s do it after the high Roman fashion, And make death proud to take us.

Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies A lass unparallel’d.

Before mine eyes in opposition sits Grim Death my son and foe.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

Oh do not die, for I shall hate All women so, when thou art gone.

But oh! as to embrace me she inclin’d, I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.

So may he rest; his faults lie gently on him!

Here closed in death th’ attentive eyes That saw the manners in the face.

One great society alone on earth: The noble Living and the noble Dead.