IAGO

A dark lean face, a narrow, slanting eye,
Whose deeps of blackness one pale taper’s beam
Haunts with a fitting madness of desire;
A heart whose cinder at the breath of passion
Glows to a momentary core of heat
Almost beyond indifference to endure: 
So parched Iago frets his life away. 
His scorn works ever in a brain whose wit
This world hath fools too many and gross to seek. 
Ever to live incredibly alone,
Masked, shivering, deadly, with a simple Moor
Of idiot gravity, and one pale flower
Whose chill would quench in everlasting peace
His soul’s unmeasured flame—­O paradox! 
Might he but learn the trick!—­to wear her heart
One fragile hour of heedless innocence,
And then, farewell, and the incessant grave. 
“O fool!  O villain!”—­’tis the shuttlecock
Wit never leaves at rest.  It is his fate
To be a needle in a world of hay,
Where honour is the flattery of the fool;
Sin, a tame bauble; lies, a tiresome jest;
Virtue, a silly, whitewashed block of wood
For words to fell.  Ah! but the secret lacking,
The secret of the child, the bird, the night,
Faded, flouted, bespattered, in days so far
Hate cannot bitter them, nor wrath deny;
Else were this Desdemona....  Why! 
Woman a harlot is, and life a nest
Fouled by long ages of forked fools.  And God—­
Iago deals not with a tale so dull: 
To have made the world!  Fie on thee, Artisan!

IMOGEN

Even she too dead! all languor on her brow,
All mute humanity’s last simpleness,—­
And yet the roses in her cheeks unfallen! 
Can death haunt silence with a silver sound? 
Can death, that hushes all music to a close,
Pluck one sweet wire scarce-audible that trembles,
As if a little child, called Purity,
Sang heedlessly on of his dear Imogen? 
Surely if some young flowers of Spring were put
Into the tender hollow of her heart,
’Twould faintly answer, trembling in their petals. 
Poise but a wild bird’s feather, it will stir
On lips that even in silence wear the badge
Only of truth.  Let but a cricket wake,
And sing of home, and bid her lids unseal
The unspeakable hospitality of her eyes. 
O childless soul—­call once her husband’s name! 
And even if indeed from these green hills
Of England, far, her spirit flits forlorn,
Back to its youthful mansion it will turn,
Back to the floods of sorrow these sweet locks
Yet heavy bear in drops; and Night shall see
Unwearying as her stars still Imogen,
Pausing ’twixt death and life on one hushed word.

POLONIUS