Sonnet LXVI
As to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplac’d, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgrac’d, And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill, And simple truth miscall’d simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that to die, I leave my love alone. By W. Shakespeare Hamlet’s Soliloquy To be, or not to be, – that is the question; Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? – To die, - to sleep; No more; and, by a sleep, to say we end The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, – ‘tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, – to sleep; – To sleep! Perchance to dream; ay; ther’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause; there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will, And makes us bear those ills we have That fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’ver with the pale cast of thought; And enterprises of great pitch and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action… (From Hamlet by W. Shakespeare) Sonnet LXXXI Or shall I live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten; From hence your memory death cannot take, Although in me each part will be forgotten. Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Though I, once gone, to all the world must die: The earth can yield me but a common grave, When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o’ver-read; And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live – such virtue hath my pen – Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men. By W. Shakespeare
Fatigue The man in the corner all slimped over looks forlorner than a tired lover,
forehead dulled with heavy working, eyelids lulled by the train’s jerking;
head hangs noddy limbs so limply among a number he dozes simply; a dumb slumber a dead ending, a spent body homeward wending. By Peggy Bacon Analyzing Prose
Ex. 55. Read the text. Psycho Norman Bates heard the noise and a shock went through him. It sounded as though somebody was tapping on the windowpane. He looked up, hastily, half prepared to rise, and the book slid from his hands to his ample lap. Then he realized that the sound was merely rain. Late afternoon rain, striking the parlor window. Norman hadn’t noticed the coming of the rain, nor the twilight. But it was quite dim here in the parlor now, and he reached over to switch on the lamp before resuming his reading. It was one of those old-fashioned table lamps, the kind with the ornate glass shade and the crystal fringe. Mother had had it ever since he could remember, and she refused to get rid of it. Norman didn’t really object; he had lived in this house for all of the forty years of his life, and there was something quite pleasant and reassuring about being surrounded by familiar things. Here everything was orderly and ordained; it was only there, outside, that the changes took place. And most of those changes held a potential threat. Suppose he had spent the afternoon walking, for example? He might have been off on some lonely side road or even back in the swamps when the rain came, and then what? He’d be soaked to the skin, forced to stumble along home in the dark. You could catch your death of cold that way, and besides, who wanted to be out in the dark? It was much nicer here in the parlor, under the lamp, with a good book for company. The light shone down on his plump face, reflected from his rimless glasses, bathed the pinkness of his scalp beneath the thinning sandy hair as he bent his head again to resume reading. From Psycho by Robert Bloch.
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