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The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

Chapter 1106: XIV
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About This Book

This collection gathers dramatic works and lyrical poems spanning comedies, tragedies, histories, and a sonnet sequence, presenting plays in verse and prose alongside narrative poems. The pieces examine human experience through recurring themes of love, ambition, jealousy, power, fate, and the tension between appearance and reality, moving between comic confusion and tragic collapse. Language and theatrical craft are central, employing vivid imagery, rhetorical invention, puns, and varied poetic forms to probe identity, political conflict, and moral choice across intimate moments and public spectacle.

XIV

Good night, good rest. Ah, neither be my share:
She bade good night that kept my rest away;
And daff’d me to a cabin hang’d with care,
To descant on the doubts of my decay.
    “Farewell,” quoth she, “and come again tomorrow:”
    Fare well I could not, for I supp’d with sorrow.

Yet at my parting sweetly did she smile,
In scorn or friendship, nill I conster whether:
’T may be, she joy’d to jest at my exile,
’T may be, again to make me wander thither:
    “Wander,” a word for shadows like myself,
    As take the pain, but cannot pluck the pelf.

Lord, how mine eyes throw gazes to the east!
My heart doth charge the watch; the morning rise
Doth cite each moving sense from idle rest.
Not daring trust the office of mine eyes,
    While Philomela sits and sings, I sit and mark,
    And wish her lays were tuned like the lark.

For she doth welcome daylight with her ditty,
And drives away dark dreaming night.
The night so pack’d, I post unto my pretty;
Heart hath his hope and eyes their wished sight;
    Sorrow chang’d to solace, solace mix’d with sorrow;
    For why, she sigh’d, and bade me come tomorrow.

Were I with her, the night would post too soon;
But now are minutes added to the hours;
To spite me now, each minute seems a moon;
Yet not for me, shine sun to succour flowers!
    Pack night, peep day; good day, of night now borrow:
    Short, night, tonight, and length thyself tomorrow.