Death and Mourning

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough, That sometime grew within this learned man.

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!

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!

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.

When all the world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell that is not Heaven.

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place; for where we are is hell, And where hell is there must we ever be.

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it: Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells, In being deprived of everlasting bliss?

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

Tamburlaine, the Scourge of God, must die.

What then remains but that we still should cry For being born, and, being born, to die?

Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns on water, or but writes in dust.

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

The world’s a bubble, and the life of man Less than a span.

Let the dozing soul remember, let the mind awake and revive by contemplating how our life goes by so swiftly and how our death comes near so silently; how quickly pleasure fades, and how when it is recalled it give us pain, how we seem always to think that times past must have been better than today.

For in the sterres, clerer than is glas, Is writen, God woot, whoso koude it rede, The deeth of every man.

What is this world? what asketh men to have? Now with his love, now in his colde grave Allone, withouten any compaignye.

This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo, And we been pilgrymes, passing to and fro. Deeth is an ende of every worldly soore.

Someone spoke of your death, Heraclitus. 4 It brought me Tears, and I remembered how often together We ran the sun down with talk… somewhere You’ve long been dust, my Halicarnassian friend. But your Nightingales live on. Though the Deathworld Claws at everything, it will not touch them. 3

Mankind, fleet of life, like tree leaves, weak creatures of clay, unsubstantial as shadows, wingless, ephemeral, wretched, mortal and dreamlike.

Who knows but life be that which men call death, And death what men call life?

When good men die their goodness does not perish, But lives though they are gone. As for the bad, All that was theirs dies and is buried with them.

Today’s today. Tomorrow, we may be ourselves gone down the drain of Eternity.

Dishonor will not trouble me, once I am dead.

God, these old men! How they pray for death! How heavy they find this life in the slow drag of days! And yet, when Death comes near them, You will not find one who will rise and walk with him, not one whose years are still a burden to him.