(from As You Like It, spoken by Jaques)
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms; And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
Of Chesterton, In the County of Huntingdon, Esquire How blessed is he, who leads a Country Life, Unvex’d with anxious Cares, and void of Strife! Who studying Peace, and shunning Civil Rage, Enjoy’d his Youth, and now enjoys his Age:
Miracles Attending Israel’s Journey When Isr’el, freed from Pharaoh’s hand, Left the proud tyrant and his land, The tribes with cheerful homage own Their king; and Judah was his throne.
Titan! to whose immortal eyes The sufferings of mortality, Seen in their sad reality, Were not as things that gods despise; What was thy pity's recompense? A silent suffering, and intense; The rock, the vulture, and the chain, All that the proud can feel of pain, The agony they do not show, The suffocating sense of woe, Which speaks but in its loneliness, And then is jealous lest the sky Should have a listener, nor will sigh Until its voice is echoless.
Do not allow me to sink, I said To a top floating ribbon of kelp. As I was lifted on each wave And made to slide into the vale I wanted not to drown. I wanted To make it all right with my dear, To tell my cat I’ll be away, To have them all destroyed, the poems
Oh, what a lantern, what a lamp of light Is thy pure word to me To clear my paths and guide my goings right! I swore and swear again, I of the statues will observer be, Thou justly dost ordain.
The heavy weights of grief oppress me sore: Lord, raise me by the word, As thou to me didst promise heretofore. And this unforced praise I for an off’ring bring, accept, O Lord, And show to me thy ways.
As I was going down impassive Rivers, I no longer felt myself guided by haulers: Yelping redskins had taken them as targets And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.
Come, Holy Spirit, bending or not bending the grasses, appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame, at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada. I am only a man: I need visible signs. I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction. Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
The country lies flat, expressionless as the face of a stranger. Not one hillock shelters a buried bone. The city: a scene thin as a theater backdrop, where no doors open, no streets extend beyond the view from the corner.
Only the railroad embankment is high, shaggy with grass. Only the freight, knuckling a red sun under its wheels, drags familiar box-car shapes down long perspectives of childhood meals and all crossings at sunset.
Ink-black, but moving independently across the black and white parquet of print, the ant cancels the author out. The page, translated to itself, bears hair-like legs disturbing the fine hairs of its fiber. These are the feet of summer, pillaging meaning, destroying Alexandria. Sunlight is silence laying waste all languages, until, thinly,
We aged a hundred years and this descended In just one hour, as at a stroke. The summer had been brief and now was ended; The body of the ploughed plains lay in smoke.
The hushed road burst in colors then, a soaring Lament rose, ringing silver like a bell. And so I covered up my face, imploring God to destroy me before battle fell.
Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee, Before I knew thy face or name; So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be; Still when, to where thou wert, I came, Some lovely glorious nothing I did see. But since my soul, whose child love is, Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do, More subtle than the parent is Love must not be, but take a body too; And therefore what thou wert, and who, I bid Love ask, and now That it assume thy body, I allow, And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.
In the greenest of our valleys By good angels tenanted, Once a fair and stately palace— Radiant palace—reared its head. In the monarch Thought’s dominion, It stood there! Never seraph spread a pinion Over fabric half so fair!
No other man, unless it was Doc Hill, Did more for people in this town than l. And all the weak, the halt, the improvident And those who could not pay flocked to me. I was good-hearted, easy Doctor Meyers. I was healthy, happy, in comfortable fortune, Blest with a congenial mate, my children raised, All wedded, doing well in the world.
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