by Coleridge · Cluster: Grief and Loss · Elegy · Clothing and Costume
Abstract
A dramatic fragment from Jonson’s Poetaster, adapted by Coleridge: a consoling speech on how grief over a love ravished by death cracks the strongest virtue and makes the heart-strings jar.
Connections
Motifs: Death Themes & Concepts: Grief and Loss, Romantic Love Forms & Genres: Fragment, Verse Drama
Testo integrale / Full text
Act I, Scene 1. O my Tibullus, Let us not blame him; for against such chances The heartiest strife of virtue is not proof. We may read constancy and fortitude To other souls; but had ourselves been struck 5 With the like planet, had our loves, like his, Been ravished from us by injurious death, And in the height and heat of our best days, It would have cracked our sinews, shrunk our veins, And made our very heart-strings jar like his. 10
Let us not blame him: for against such chances The heartiest strife of manhood is scarce proof. We may read constancy and fortitude To other souls — but had ourselves been struck Even in the height and heat of our keen wishing, It might have made our heart-strings jar, like his. First published as a quotation in the Historie and Gestes of Maxilian contributed to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, January, 1822. Reprinted as Fragment No. 59, P. W., 1893, p. 460.