Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Hamlet's words

"O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self slaughter! O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possesses it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two.
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month --
Let me not think on't -- Frailty, thy name is woman! --
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears: -- why she, even she --
O, God! a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle,
My father's brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules. Within a month,
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good.
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue."

In this soliloquy Hamlet expresses first his desire to die, but he realizes that suicide is a sin and he does not want to be damned to hell. He sees the world as a terrible place, looking at every situation with a depressing and pessimistic view. He asks how his mother went from a 'sun god' (his father) to a 'goat' (his uncle). He says that his father loved her so much and wouldn't ever harm her. He thinks that his mother moved on so quickly, as if she grieved for a matter of seconds before she snapped out of it. He compares the situation to an animals, saying that the animal would have grieved longer. The last few lines he touches on the fact that he thinks his mother and uncle's marriage is filthy and incestuous, filled with promiscuity.

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