Pain and Despair

The wounds invisible That love’s keen arrows make.

Oppress’d with two weak evils, age and hunger.

Some of us will smart for it.

For there was never yet philosopher That could endure the toothache patiently.

Charm ache with air and agony with words.

O sleep! O gentle sleep! 21 Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless, So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone, Drew Priam’s curtain in the dead of night, And would have told him half his Troy was burn’d.

What! wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?

Here are a few of the unpleasant’st words That ever blotted paper.

Worse than the sun in March This praise doth nourish agues.

Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth In strange eruptions.

So shaken as we are, so wan with care.

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate, That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.

One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book.

Past hope, past cure, past help!

One fire burns out another’s burning, One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.

Now is this golden crown like a deep well That owes two buckets filling one another; The emptier ever dancing in the air, The other down, unseen and full of water: That bucket down and full of tears am I, Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.

You may my glories and my state depose, But not my griefs; still am I king of those.

And my large kingdom for a little grave, A little little grave, an obscure grave.

Eating the bitter bread of banishment.

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows.

O! who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat? O, no! the apprehension of the good Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.

For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite The man that mocks at it and sets it light.

Must I not serve a long apprenticehood To foreign passages, and in the end, Having my freedom, boast of nothing else But that I was a journeyman to grief?