Death and Mourning

Thou know’st ’tis common; all that live must die, Passing through nature to eternity.

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

In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.

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

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.

O! pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers; Thou art the ruins of the noblest man That ever lived in the tide of times.

O mighty Caesar! dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, Shrunk to this little measure?

When beggars die there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.

His cares are now all ended.

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.

I could have better spar’d a better man.

Thy ignominy sleep with thee in the grave, But not remember’d in thy epitaph!

This earth, that bears thee dead, Bears not alive so stout a gentleman.

But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool; And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop. O! I could prophesy, But that the earthy and cold hand of death Lies on my tongue.

Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily.

The end of life cancels all bands.

For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

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

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!

How oft when men are at the point of death Have they been merry!

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

They have made worms’ meat of me.

The true beginning of our end. 10