Shakespeare's Sonnet 146. I read this one for the first time today. I always liked 104 too, although don't think that 3 winters passing is very long. Let's see if we feel the same after 50 winters. A very nice, very interesting man who grows fruit trees and practices at the yoga studio I work at (the restful job compared to the hospital work (which I do try to bring restfulness to, oh that is the work indeed)) gives me a transcendental quote or verse of something every week and sometimes an apple.
I was telling him how much I liked the plays and he recited several long passages to me. I'm always very impressed by people who can recite, it either takes great efforts of the particular type of memory that I don't have. Although I still remember by heart the Robert Burns poem we had to learn at school when I was about 9. When I once worked a very boring job in a museum (I know, how could it be boring working in a museum? But I assure you that this particular position was..)I tried to memorise poems, plays and facts to fill the time but never got very far. My boyfriend at the time gave me a tiny copy of Othello that I could keep in my pocket and read when no one was looking. There was another guy doing the same job as me who used to buy books from the charity shop and tear out the pages, bringing in a few each day and destroying them as he read them so that no on would know. Sometimes when I felt my mind was about to atrophy I would run up to the locker room and read a few pages of Virginia Woolf then sneak back to my post. Sounds like some kind of dystopian world we were living in. Hey, wait a minute....
When I look at my diary from that time there are however some very funny and interesting little vignettes which I should perhaps post some time. It's true that restrictions can be of use and that the things we haven't enjoyed of course teach us. Also that the mundane or terrible can be amusing or beautiful in retrospect.
The Sonnet -
Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth,
Lord of these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease.
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store,
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.
So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there’s no more dying then.
