Page 2310 - Shakespeare - Vol. 4

To imitate thee well, against my heart
Will fix a sharp knife to affright mine eye,
Who if it wink shall thereon fall and die:
These means as frets upon an instrument [1140]

Shall tune our heart-strings to true languishment.

«And for, poor bird, thou sing’st not in the day,
As shaming any eye should thee behold,
Some dark deep desert seated from the way,

That knows not parching heat nor freezing cold, [1145]
Will we find out; and there we will unfold
To creatures stern, sad tunes to change their kinds:
Since men prove beasts, let beasts bear gentle minds».

As the poor frighted deer that stands at gaze,

Wildly determining which way to fly, [1150]
Or one encompass’d with a winding maze,
That cannot tread the way out readily;
So with herself is she in mutiny,
To live or die which of the twain were better,

When life is sham’d and death reproach’s debtor. [1155]

«To kill myself», quoth she, «alack what were it,
But with my body my poor soul’s pollution?
They that lose half with greater patience bear it

Than they whose whole is swallowed in confusion.
That mother tries a merciless conclusion, [1160]
Who having two sweet babes, when death takes one,
Will slay the other and be nurse to none.

«My body or my soul, which was the dearer,

When the one pure, the other made divine?
Whose love of either to myself was nearer, [1165]
When both were kept for heaven and Collatine?
Ay me, the bark pill’d from the lofty pine,

His leaves will wither and his sap decay;
So must my soul, her bark being pill’d away.