Mojo, The Bard, & Me

 

Today’s Totally Random Lines

 

The other two, slight air and purging fire,

Are both with thee, wherever I abide;

The first my thought, the other my desire,

These present-absent with swift motion slide.

 

Narrator

Sonnet 45                                                

 

That’s the first quatrain of Sonnet 45. Here’s the rest of it.

For when these quicker elements are gone

In tender embassy of love to thee,

My life, being made of four, with two alone

Sinks down to death, opprest with melancholy;

Until life’s composition be recured

By those swift messengers return’d from thee,

Who even but now come back again, assured

Of thy fair health, recounting it to me:

        This told, I joy; but then no longer glad,

        I send them back again, and straight grow sad.

Well, what do you make of that?  Here, let me give you a little blurb from my Shakespeare’s Sonnets Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and see if that helps. Speaking of Sonnet 45...

This follows on immediately from the preceding sonnet’s focus on the speaker’s confinement in the elements of earth and water. The remaining, mobile elements of air and fire have been dispatched from the poet to his friend, leaving him depressed and heavy.

That’s it in a nutshell, and it's still pretty confusing. I think we'll just pass on this one.

Wait, what? Did he say he's passing?

Whew, that's a relief!