Death and Mourning

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.

Hector is dead; there is no more to say.

The end crowns all, And that old common arbitrator, Time, Will one day end it.

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

O proud death! What feast is toward in thine eternal cell?

The rest is silence.

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

O God! Horatio, what a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me. If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story.

This fell sergeant, death, Is strict in his arrest.

Sweets to the sweet: farewell!

I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid, And not have strew’d thy grave.

Lay her i’ the earth; And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring!

A ministering angel shall my sister be.

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

We have done but greenly, In hugger-mugger to inter him.

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

Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d, No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head.

And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf.

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand an end, Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee.

What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous; 32 and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?

Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral bak’d meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven Ere I had ever seen that day.

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.