/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22936079]

“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”

Does it get better than that?

[Anonymous No.22936127]

>>22936079
>1200px

[Anonymous No.22936498]

tl;dr: Slow down, stud.

[Anonymous No.22936504]

>>22936127
Sorry bro I didn't have a picture of Shakespeare lying around on my hard drive.

[Anonymous No.22936518]

>>22936079
how tf does he do it bros?

[Anonymous No.22936570]

>>22936518
And why has nobody come close to matching him?

[Anonymous No.22937843]

>>22936079
no one who loves wants to live long

[Anonymous No.22937984]

>>22936498
>>22936504
>>22936518
>>22936570
>>22937843
All written by Francis Bacon BTW

[Anonymous No.22938117]

[Anonymous No.22938127]

>>22936079
Sometimes when you read Shakespeare you get the sense he must have had an extra part of his brain or something. It's so extremely excellent and so natural also.

[Anonymous No.22938177]

>>22938127
This.

[Anonymous No.22938250]

>>22936079
Read his sonnets, they're beautiful. Shakespeare is absolutely phenomenal and I'm infatuated with the way he conveys emotion in his writing, especially in his sonnets. They're elegant, charming and romantic. He's just a brilliant writer all around.

[Anonymous No.22938356]

>>22938250
Yeah, I used to think he wrote his poetry for the sake of his plays, recently I've learned that it's the exact opposite. I also highly recommend his long-form poems like Lucrece and Venus & Adonis

[Anonymous No.22938388]

>>22936079
>Therefore love moderately
Cringy anti-petrarchan slop. The preceding lines demonstrate the opposite of the conclusion, how beautiful a consuming and destructive passion can be

[Anonymous No.22938411]

>>22938117
This is wisdom in its most pure and unedited form. Andrew Tate could mentally outmaneuver 90% of /lit/ posters.

[Anonymous No.22938412]

>>22938388
You realize these are lines placed in the mouth of a character, right?

[Anonymous No.22938421]

>>22938388
Many of his early sonnets have this theme of "love advice," so much so that it actually seems to be addressed to a real person and isn't just some abstract thought or generalization about love.

[Anonymous No.22938439]

>tardy
heh

[Anonymous No.22938561]

>>22938439
lol

[Anonymous No.22938571]

>>22938388
Beauty is eternal. It is finite.

[Anonymous No.22938694]

>>22936079
For me it's:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

[Anonymous No.22938708]

>>22938694
Wake up arisen

[Anonymous No.22938797]

>>22936079
The metrical/semantic mirroring of the first line is very satisfying, in a sexual way.

[Anonymous No.22938811]

>>22938694
For me, it's:

That being done I walked to Greenwich, and there to the office pretty late expecting Captain Cocke’s coming, which he did, and so with me to my new lodging (and there I chose rather to lie because of my interest in the goods that we have brought there to lie), but the people were abed, so we knocked them up, and so I to bed, and in the night was mightily troubled with a looseness (I suppose from some fresh damp linen that I put on this night), and feeling for a chamber-pott, there was none, I having called the mayde up out of her bed, she had forgot I suppose to put one there; so I was forced in this strange house to rise and shit in the chimney twice; and so to bed and was very well again

[Anonymous No.22939243]

Who else can compare?

[Anonymous No.22939791]

>>22938127
he was just in the right place at the right time. English was way freer then but he happened to lock things in at the perfect moment. He does have a gift for metaphor (the essential mark of genius), but the language thing is blurred by our own context and makes him look cooler than he really is.

>>22938250
You sound kind of gay. Honestly his poems all lack a sense of transcendence. They are quintessentially modernist, the first twinkling moment of modernism when it could still borrow everything of true religion but its substance.

[Anonymous No.22940595]

>>22939791
Nta but elegance, charm and romance are all legitimately desirable qualities in a sonnet. If you have a problem with courtly love poetry then just say that.

I agree about the distorting effect by which Shakespeare gets credit for a lot of qualities which are simply inherent to the time because people aren't aware of his contemporaries. But knowing his contemporaries also provides great opportunities for direct comparison and all the ways in which he really *is* superior. I get it if you have an Eliot-style bone to pick with him for spiritual reasons or whatever but he is special in a way that you are failing to acknowledge.

[Anonymous No.22940603]

>>22939791
>he was just in the right place at the right time
>the language thing is blurred by our own context and makes him look cooler than he really is
Try actually reading anyone before or in his time and you will see this isn't true, at least for the most part. NO ONE could have hoped to do what he did.

[Anonymous No.22940619]

>>22936079
Sometimes I’m so fucking glad English was my first language. I’m not sure Shakespeare was using a different part of his brain, but when I read him for any length of time I feel like I’m activating a different part of my brain that usually lies dormant, and in half conscious thoughts such as before falling asleep or wakening I almost feel like I’m thinking in iambic pentameter as if plugged into Shakespeare’s language itself. The only other thing that’s come even remotely close to having the same effect is some passages of Melville

[Anonymous No.22940636]

>Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow
This line doesn't make sense

[Anonymous No.22940760]

>>22940636
ESL

[Anonymous No.22941297]

>>22940636
It elaborates on "moderately", I suppose. Too fast, or too much, and you go past the goal line; too slow, or too little, and you never get there. Think of it in context of Romeo and Juliets situation.

[Anonymous No.22941310]

>>22939243
Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I shall endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here...

Love, which quickly arrests the gentle heart,
Seized him with my beautiful form
That was taken from me, in a manner which still grieves me.

Love, which pardons no beloved from loving,
took me so strongly with delight in him
That, as you see, it still abandons me not...

[Anonymous No.22941450]

>>22936079
It doesn't move me. There is no rhythm there.
t. ESL

[Anonymous No.22941547]

>>22941450
Early modern english had a different flow.
https://voca.ro/12ws6A0Sadmo

[Anonymous No.22941574]

>>22939791
ESL.

[Anonymous No.22941585]

>>22941574
Pound said something similar. About EME, not how Shakspeare's works lack transendence (which they do in a way).

[Anonymous No.22941599]

>>22941585
>ESL
>ebook slop
>Pound
>which they do in a way
Samir.

[Anonymous No.22943007]

>>22936079
Never has and never will

[Anonymous No.22943014]

>>22936079
In the Theatre the whole man, with his lowest and his highest passions, is placed in terrifying nakedness before himself, and by himself is driven to quivering joy, to surging sorrow, to hell and heaven. What lies beyond all possibility of the ordinary man's experiencing in his own life, he lives it here; and lives it in himself, in his sympathy deep-harrowed by the wondrous duping. One may weaken this effect through the senseless abuse of a daily repetition (which draws after it a great perversion of the receptive powers), but never suppress the possibility of its fullest outburst; and finally, that outburst may be played on, according to the ruling interest of the day, for any manner of corruptive end. In awe and shuddering, have the greatest poets of all nations and all times approached this terrible abyss; 'twas they devised the aimful laws, the sacred conjurations, to bann the demon lurking there, by aid of the good genius; and Aeschylus with priestly rites led e'en the chained Erinnyes, as divine and reverend Eumenides, to the seat of their redemption from a baneful curse. 'Twas this abyss great Calderon arched over with the heavenly rainbow, conducting to the country of the saints; from out its depths stupendous Shakespeare conjured up the demon's self, to set it plainly, fettered by his giant force, before the astonished world as its own essence, alike to be subdued; upon its wisely measured, calmly trodden verge, did Goethe build the temple of his Iphigenia, did Schiller plant God's miracle tree of his Jungfrau von Orleans. To this abyss have fared the wizards of the art of Tone, and shed the balm of heaven's melody into the gaping wounds of man; here Mozart shaped his masterworks, and hither yearned Beethoven's dreams of proving finally his utmost strength. But, once the great, the hallowed sorcerers yield place, the Furies of vulgarity, of lowest ribaldry, of vilest passions, the sottish Gnomes of most dishonouring delights, lead high their revels round its brink. Banish hence the kindly spirits—(and little trouble will it cost you: ye merely need to not invoke them trustfully!)—and ye leave the field, where Gods had wandered, to the filthiest spawn of Hell; and these will come uncalled, for there have they ever had a home whence naught could scare them but the advent of the Gods.

[Anonymous No.22943039]

>>22941585
Different types of language can be used differently. Poundian simplicity and Shakespearean exuberance both have their place and are adapted well to the goals of their authors.