Suppose I'd make a tragedy of this, Focus my fancied "Dante" to this theme, And leave my halfwrit "Sappho," which at best Is just another delving in the mine That gave me "Cleopatra" and the Sonnets? If you have genius, write my tragedy, And call it "Shakespeare, Gentleman of Stratford," Who lost his soul amid a thousand souls, And had to live without it, yet live with it As wretched as the souls whose lives he lived. Here is a play for you: Poor William Shakespeare, This moment growing drunk, the famous author Of certain sugared sonnets and some plays, With this machine too much to him, which started Some years ago, now cries him nay and runs Even when the house shakes and complains, "I fall, You shake me down, my timbers break apart. Why, if an engine must go on like this The building should be stronger." Or to mix, And by the mixing, unmix metaphors, No mortal man has blood enough for brains And stomach too, when the brain is never done With thinking and creating. For you see, I pluck a flower, cut off a dragon's head-- Choose twixt these figures--lo, a dozen buds, A dozen heads out-crop. For every fancy, Play, sonnet, what you will, I write me out With thinking "Now I'm done," a hundred others Crowd up for voices, and, like twins unborn Kick and turn o'er for entrance to the world. And I, poor fecund creature, who would rest, As 'twere from an importunate husband, fly To money-lending, farming, mulberry trees, Enclosing Welcombe fields, or idling hours In common talk with people like the Combes. All this to get a heartiness, a hold On earth again, lest Heaven Hercules, Finding me strayed to mid-air, kicking heels Above the mountain tops, seize on my scruff And bear me off or strangle. Good, my friends, The "Tempest" is as nothing to the voice That calls me to performance--what I know not. I've planned an epic of the Asian wash Which slopped the star of Athens and put out, Which should all history analyze, and present A thousand notables in the guise of life, And show the ancient world and worlds to come To the last blade of thought and tiniest seed Of growth to be. With visions such as these My spirit turns in restless ecstacy, And this enslaved brain is master sponge, And sucks the blood of body, hands and feet. While my poor spirit, like a butterfly Gummed in its shell, beats its bedraggled wings, And cannot rise.