The former post was removed as it was off topic. We will be migrating to registration-only forums at jollyrogerwest.com Great Books forums and booksliterature.com Great Books forums. These are Great Books sites, and we prefer posts such as:

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. --R. W. EmersonIf you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
T. S. EliotAfter I wrote this sonnet there appeared to me a miraculous vision in which I saw things that made me
resolve to say no more about this blessed one until I should be capable of writing about her in a nobler
way. -Dante on his inspiration for The Divine Comedy, after falling short of Beatrice's splendor in the
Vita Nuova

VIII



Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?

Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:

Why lov'st thou that which thou receiv'st not gladly,

Or else receiv'st with pleasure thine annoy?

If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,

By unions married, do offend thine ear,

They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds

In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear. 

Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,

Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;

Resembling sire and child and happy mother,

Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:

  Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,

  Sings this to thee: 'Thou single wilt prove none.'



IX



Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye,

That thou consum'st thy self in single life?

Ah! if thou issueless shalt hap to die,

The world will wail thee like a makeless wife;

The world will be thy widow and still weep

That thou no form of thee hast left behind,

When every private widow well may keep

By children's eyes, her husband's shape in mind:

Look! what an unthrift in the world doth spend

Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;

But beauty's waste hath in the world an end,

And kept unused the user so destroys it.

  No love toward others in that bosom sits

  That on himself such murd'rous shame commits.

 	--William Shakespeare