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Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth

Chapter 20: THE SPIRIT OF SHAKESPEARE: Continued.
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About This Book

A varied collection of lyrics and sonnets that celebrates the sensory life of earth while probing larger moral and philosophical questions. Poems evoke woodlands, meadows, and pastoral music, employ classical and mythic allusion, and meditate on love, change, and the tension between wild impulse and cultivated wisdom. Ballads and shorter lyrics supply narrative motion and vivid imagery; sonnets compress reflective argument about time, art, and the self. The overall tone moves between exuberant celebration and guarded instruction, using musical diction and dense metaphor to connect natural perception with human feeling and ethical awareness.

THE SPIRIT OF SHAKESPEARE:
Continued.

How smiles he at a generation ranked
In gloomy noddings over life! They pass.
Not he to feed upon a breast unthanked,
Or eye a beauteous face in a cracked glass.
But he can spy that little twist of brain
Which moved some weighty leader of the blind,
Unwitting ’twas the goad of personal pain,
To view in curst eclipse our Mother’s mind,
And show us of some rigid harridan
The wretched bondmen till the end of time.
O lived the Master now to paint us Man,
That little twist of brain would ring a chime
Of whence it came and what it caused, to start
Thunders of laughter, clearing air and heart.