Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.

Old Hamlet's Ghost

Ghost: I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.

Brian Blessed as King Lear

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!

From "Twelfth Night," by William Shakespeare

Clown:
Good madonna, why mournest thou?

OLIVIA:
Good fool, for my brother's death.

Clown:
I think his soul is in hell, madonna.

OLIVIA:
I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

Clown:
The more fool you, madonna, to mourn for your brother's
soul being in heaven.

Will's Weird Witches

"The Smiler With A Knife"

Humour is for them the all-consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is “mean”; if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer “mean” but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humorous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful – unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke. A thousand bawdy, or even blasphemous, jokes do not help towards a man’s damnation so much as his discovery that almost anything he wants to do can be done, not only without the disapproval but with the admiration of his fellows, if only it can get itself treated as a Joke. And this temptation can almost be hidden from your patient by that … seriousness about Humour. Any suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as “Puritanical” or as betraying a “lack of humour.”

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters.

Remember, Remember: From Neil Gaiman's The Sandman

Will Shakespeare and Ben Jonson discuss topics of the day and dash off a little poem together.

Winter: Favorite Poems

Winter

When icicles hang by the wall,

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,

And Tom bears logs into the hall,

And milk comes frozen home in pail;

When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,

Then nightly sings the staring owl.

Tu-whit, to-who! a merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,

And coughing drowns the parson's saw,

And birds sit brooding in the snow,

And Marian's nose looks red and raw;

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

Then nightly sings the staring owl.

Tu-whit, to-who! a merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

--William Shakespeare (1564-1616).

A lovely little gem on country life in the winter; most of the details still apply, from bad roads ("ways be foul") to coughing during the Sunday sermon ("parson's saw"). One particularly Christmasy detail are the "roasted crabs", which aren't seafood but roasted crab-apples, cooked in the wassail-bowl. And "greasy Joan" who "keels" (cools by stirring and skimming the top of) the pot is not greasy with food: she's sweating from working near the hot cooking pot. The keen little illustration is by Pauline Baynes, Lor' bless 'er.