“Let him have time to tear his curled hair,
Let him have time against himself to rave,
Let him have time of Time’s help to despair,
Let him have time to live a loathed slave,
Let him have time a beggar’s orts to crave,
And time to see one that by alms doth live
Disdain to him disdained scraps to give.
“Let him have time to see his friends his foes,
And merry fools to mock at him resort;
Let him have time to mark how slow time goes
In time of sorrow, and how swift and short
His time of folly and his time of sport;
And ever let his unrecalling crime
Have time to wail th’ abusing of his time.
“O Time, thou tutor both to good and bad,
Teach me to curse him that thou taught’st this ill!
At his own shadow let the thief run mad,
Himself himself seek every hour to kill.
Such wretched hands such wretched blood should spill,
For who so base would such an office have
As sland’rous deathsman to so base a slave?
“The baser is he, coming from a king,
To shame his hope with deeds degenerate.
The mightier man, the mightier is the thing
That makes him honoured or begets him hate;
For greatest scandal waits on greatest state.
The moon being clouded presently is missed,
But little stars may hide them when they list.
“The crow may bathe his coal-black wings in mire,
And unperceived fly with the filth away;
But if the like the snow-white swan desire,
The stain upon his silver down will stay.
Poor grooms are sightless night, kings glorious day.
Gnats are unnoted wheresoe’er they fly,
But eagles gazed upon with every eye.
“Out, idle words, servants to shallow fools,
Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators!
Busy yourselves in skill-contending schools;
Debate where leisure serves with dull debaters;
To trembling clients be you mediators.
For me, I force not argument a straw,
Since that my case is past the help of law.
“In vain I rail at Opportunity,
At Time, at Tarquin, and uncheerful night;
In vain I cavil with mine infamy,
In vain I spurn at my confirmed despite.
This helpless smoke of words doth me no right.
The remedy indeed to do me good
Is to let forth my foul defiled blood.
“Poor hand, why quiver’st thou at this decree?
Honour thyself to rid me of this shame,
For if I die, my honour lives in thee,
But if I live, thou liv’st in my defame.
Since thou couldst not defend thy loyal dame,
And wast afeared to scratch her wicked foe,
Kill both thyself and her for yielding so.”
This said, from her betumbled couch she starteth,
To find some desp’rate instrument of death;
But this no slaughterhouse no tool imparteth
To make more vent for passage of her breath,
Which, thronging through her lips, so vanisheth
As smoke from Ætna, that in air consumes,
Or that which from discharged cannon fumes.
“In vain,” quoth she, “I live, and seek in vain
Some happy mean to end a hapless life.
I feared by Tarquin’s falchion to be slain,
Yet for the self-same purpose seek a knife.
But when I feared I was a loyal wife;
So am I now.—O no, that cannot be!
Of that true type hath Tarquin rifled me.