Explore "The Two Shakespeare Tercentenaries of Birth, 1864; of Death, 1916" by Alice Meynell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
TO SHAKESPEARE
Longer than thine, than thine,
Is now my time of life; and thus thy years
Seem to be clasped and harboured within mine.
O how ignoble this my clasp appears!
Thy unprophetic birth,
Thy darkling death; living I might have seen
That cradle, marked those labours, closed that earth.
O first, O last, O infinite between!
Now that my life has shared / Thy dedicated date, O mortal, twice, / To what all-vain embrace shall be compared / My lean enclosure of thy paradise:
To ignorant arms that fold / A poet to a foolish breast? The Line, / That is not, with the world within its hold? / So, days with days, my days encompass thine.
Child, Stripling, Man -- the sod.
Might I talk little language to thee, pore / On thy last silence? O thou city of God, / My waste lies after thee, and lies before.