Читать книгу Writers on... Death (A Book of Quotes, Poems and Literary Reflections) - Amelia Carruthers - Страница 19
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An age may come, Font of Eternity, When nothing shall be either old or new.Death, so call’d, is a thing which makes men weep,And yet a third of life is pass’d in sleep.
A sleep without dreams, after a rough day Of toil, is what we covet most; and yetHow clay shrinks back from more quiescent clay! The very Suicide that pays his debtAt once without instalments (an old way Of paying debts, which creditors regret)Lets out impatiently his rushing breath,Less from disgust of life than dread of death.
‘T is round him, near him, here, there, every where; And there ‘s a courage which grows out of fear,Perhaps of all most desperate, which will dare The worst to know it:—when the mountains rearTheir peaks beneath your human foot, and there You look down o’er the precipice, and drearThe gulf of rock yawns,—you can’t gaze a minuteWithout an awful wish to plunge within it.
– Lord Byron (1788 - 1824), one of the greatest English Romantic poets; 'If From Great Nature's Or Our Own Abyss', from Don Juan (1824) – an epic satire novel-in-verse, loosely based on the legendary hero of the same name. When the first two cantos were published anonymously in 1819, the poem was criticised for its 'immoral content' though it was also an immediate popular success.
