where she stands In lava wrinkles, eight years older than I am, As years go, but I am a youth afire While she is lean and slippered. It's a Fury Which takes me sometimes, makes my hands clutch out For virgins in their teens. O sullen fancy! I want them not, I want the love which springs Like flame which blots the sun, where fuel of body Is piled in reckless generosity. ... You are most learned, Ben, Greek and Latin know, And think me nature's child, scarce understand How much of physic, law, and ancient annals I have stored up by means of studious zeal. But pass this by, and for the braggart breath Ensuing now say, "Will was in his cups, Potvaliant, boozed, corned, squiffy, obfuscated, Crapulous, inter pocula, or so forth. Good sir, or so, or friend, or gentleman, According to the phrase or the addition Of man and country, on my honor, Shakespeare At Stratford, on the twenty-second of April, Year sixteen-sixteen of our Lord was merry—      Videlicet, was drunk." Well, where was I?—      Oh yes, at braggart breath, and now to say it:      I believe and say it as I would lightly speak Of the most common thing to sense, outside Myself to touch or analyze, this mind Which has been used by Something, as I use A quill for writing, never in this world In the most high and palmy days of Greece, Or in this roaring age, has known its peer. No soul as mine has lived, felt, suffered, dreamed, Broke open spirit secrets, followed trails Of passions curious, countless lives explored As I have done. And what are Greek and Latin, The lore of Aristotle, Plato to this? Since I know them by what I am, the essence From which their utterance came, myself a flower Of every graft and being in myself The recapitulation and the complex Of all the great. Were not brains before books? And even geometries in some brain Before old Gutenberg? O fie, Ben Jonson, If I am nature's child am I not all?      Howe'er it be, ascribe this to the ale, And say that reason in me was a fume. But if you honor me, as you have said, As much as any, this side idolatry, Think, Ben, of this: That I, whate'er I be In your regard, have come to fifty-two, Defeated in my love, who knew too well That poets through the love of women turn To satyrs or to gods, even as women By the first touch of passion bloom or rot As angels or as bawds. Bethink you also How I have felt, seen, known the mystic process Working in man's soul from the woman soul As part thereof in essence, spirit and flesh, Even as a malady may 

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