A LITTLE SHAKESPEARE IN THE NIGHT
one sonnet and various lines
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O never say that I was false of heart
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify
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Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediment. Love is not love which alters
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
It is the star to every wand’ring bark
Whose worth’s unknown although his height be taken
Love’s not Time’s fool , though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending cycle’s compass comes
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
But bears it out to the edge of doom
If this be error and upon me proved
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
William Shakespeare
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Ozymandias – Poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveler from an ancient land
`Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear —
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’ SHELLEY
I met a woman from an ancient land
She dusted off her clothes and then reclined;
“You look as if you’ve traveled far,” I said,
“Have a cold drink and then some peace of mind”
- ME
MOSTLY SHAKESPEARE BELOW WITH OBVIOUS DEVIATIONS
Pleasure and action make the hours seem short
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The stroke of death is like a lover’s pinch
Which hurts and is desired
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Brevity is the soul of wit
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Men’s vows are women’s traitors
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The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief
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“Touch me once more, she smiled and said to me:
“Touch once more my tits,” she said to the man,
“I’ll give you a pair of acres.”
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The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are
Of imagination all compact
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What’s done is done and cannot be undone
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False face must hide what the false heart does know
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In time we hate that which we often fear
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The devil can cite scripture for his purpose
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There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so
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Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind
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Women may fall when there’s no strength in men
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Forgiven thieves may be strong time in time
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False face must hide what the false heart does know
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Though all his loves go rushing down the Rhine (whoops!)
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In time we hate what we always feared
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At the Temple finding time out of time
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TRUE APPARITION
on a stormy night
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I’m sitting here alone, a storm outside,
As flesh and bone all disappear to dust,
I think of the unholy things I tried;
And wonder near the end now what will last.
I loved a woman who eluded me
Amid the dust, noise, frantic in the rain,
Around each corner of the Paris streets
I watched her disappearing by the Seine.
She’s not a lover of earthly climes,
This gorgeous apparition of my dreams;
My love of her exists now beyond time:
She’s what is true, while all the world just seems.
Through hours and weeks as sorrows come again,
Unknowing Her I’d never lift a pen.
(C)2016 by William Milne
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“A hundred Keyboards you may play
Always, always, every day,
But I say, a bird sounds good,
That sings in the untouched wood!”
from a poem by Mari Muthu
Sep 23, 2016
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