Stratford
March 2, 1615
I write with rain across my oriel, and the fire almost out in my fireplace, and my loneness sniveling in its pot. I am sick of self-pity. I taste with wretched appetite, so be it! To be generous, hungry, guiltless, and free...what would I give!
Pincers, pinch harder at the rushes, keep the light burning as long as possible, for each of us.
At my age, I am guilty of longings that I can never realize: dreams hawsered to nowhere. I have been guilty of this all my life. I copulated with commas. I hunted dreams on paper—cheap privateer! I was priest, pharaoh, general, slave, glutton. Paper is a sickness, a sweltering fever, clammy forehead, thudding pulse, ague within ague: so I am a man of paper, elongated, soggy, contorted, multiple of calligraphic speculation: paper bones, paper heart, paper skull, paper blood, paper penis.
Listen, isn’t that time rustling a sheath of paper?
Snow buffets Shakespeare’s cottage:
Snow enters a window.
There are varnished ceiling beams,