Today’s Totally Random
Lines
Do,
then, dear heart; for heaven shall hear our prayers
Or
with our sighs we’ll breathe the welkin dim,
And
stain the sun with fog, as sometime clouds
When
they do hug him in their melting bosoms.
Titus
Titus Andronicus Act III, Scene i, Line
112
Absolutely beautiful lines. The welkin is the
sky, or the heavens. I think that other than that one word you should need no
help understanding what Titus is saying. Remember, he’s just had his hand cut
off, and with today’s line he’s talking to his daughter who’s been raped and
had her tongue cut out. The two of them have good reason to be sighing.
Shakespeare seems to have a fondness for writing about the father-daughter relationship. He had two girls of his own. It’s at the heart of King Lear and The Tempest, and he dwells on it a bit here. I was tempted to compare these lines to Lear’s We two alone will sing like birds in a cage speech that he speaks to Cordelia, but I took a look, and those lines are from a very different situation. Even though it is father and daughter suffering together, the birds in a cage line is the only part of it that has any relevance to Titus’s line.
So let’s just end by taking another look at today’s line. No, I’m not going to write it out again. I mean that you should go back up to the top and read today’s line one more time.
Go
ahead.
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