should be stronger." Or to mix, And by the mixing, unmix metaphors, No mortal man has blood enough for brains And stomach too, when the brain is never done With thinking and creating. For you see, I pluck a flower, cut off a dragon's head— Choose twixt these figures—lo, a dozen buds, A dozen heads out-crop. For every fancy, Play, sonnet, what you will, I write me out With thinking "Now I'm done," a hundred others Crowd up for voices, and, like twins unborn Kick and turn o'er for entrance to the world. And I, poor fecund creature, who would rest, As 'twere from an importunate husband, fly To money-lending, farming, mulberry trees, Enclosing Welcombe fields, or idling hours In common talk with people like the Combes. All this to get a heartiness, a hold On earth again, lest Heaven Hercules, Finding me strayed to mid-air, kicking heels Above the mountain tops, seize on my scruff And bear me off or strangle. Good, my friends, The "Tempest" is as nothing to the voice That calls me to performance—what I know not. I've planned an epic of the Asian wash Which slopped the star of Athens and put out, Which should all history analyze, and present A thousand notables in the guise of life, And show the ancient world and worlds to come To the last blade of thought and tiniest seed Of growth to be. With visions such as these My spirit turns in restless ecstacy, And this enslaved brain is master sponge, And sucks the blood of body, hands and feet. While my poor spirit, like a butterfly Gummed in its shell, beats its bedraggled wings, And cannot rise. I'm cold, both hands and feet. These three days past I have been cold, this hour I am warm in three days. God bless the ale. God did do well to give us anodynes. ... So now you know why I am much alone, And cannot fellow with Augustine Phillips, John Heminge, Richard Burbage, Henry Condell, And do not have them here, dear ancient friends, Who grieve, no doubt, and wonder for changed love. Love is not love which alters when it finds A change of heart, but mine has changed not, only I cannot be my old self. I blaspheme: I hunger for broiled fish, but fly the touch Of hands of flesh. I am most passionate, And long am used perplexities of love To bemoan and to bewail. And do you wonder, Seeing what I am, what my fate has been? Well, hark you; Anne is sixty now, and I, A crater which erupts, look
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