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People who knows how to handle their business literately and
confidently and forcefully and powerfully and
桃花开在四月间,
蜜蜂采蜜忙不闲。
吟诗赏月风景艳,
人生几何问青天。
有鸳无鸯夜流浪,
孤寡忧郁心空荡,
分分离离总无常,
只身度日又何妨?
年少轻狂好恶劳,
人生喜忧时常有,
脚踏实地稳步走,
勤勉谦虚最高尚,
Let the bird of loudest lay,
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
But thou, shrieking harbinger,
Foul pre-currer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever's end,
To this troop come thou not near.
From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feather'd king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.
Let the priest in surplice white,
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-defying swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.
And thou, treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak'st
With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,
'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
'Twixt the turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight:
Either was the other's mine.
Property was thus appall'd,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was call'd.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either-neither,
Simple were so well compounded.
That it cried how true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none
If what parts can so remain.
Whereupon it made this threne
To the phoenix and the dove,
Co-supreme and stars of love;
As chorus to their tragic scene.
THRENOS.
Beauty, truth, and rarity.
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos'd in cinders lie.
Death is now the phoenix' nest;
And the turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,
Leaving no posterity:--
'Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.
Truth may seem, but cannot be:
Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;
Truth and beauty buried be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
The Phoenix and Turtle is
Shakespeare's allegorical poem on the mystical nature of love.
The Phoenix and Turtle consists of 13 quatrains (four-line
stanzas) rhyming abba, followed by five triplets (stanzas of three
rhyming lines) all in iambic tetrameter . The poem tells of the
funeral of two lovers the phoenix, a mythological bird associated
with immortality, and the turtledove (usually called 'turtle' in
Elizabethan English), a symbol of fidelity. The two birds have
burned themselves to death in order to be forever joined in love.
The allegory celebrates an ideal of love in which an absolute
spiritual union of the lovers, defying rationality and common sense
is chastely achieved through death, the ultimate refection of the
world.
This allegory reflects a notion
that was widespread in the Renaissance: ideal love was felt to
transcend reason and thus to represent a truer state of being than
that of the material world. This idea, whose roots lay in the
writings of Plato, is also related to the Christian concept of the
state of grace that God offers to believers, and The Phoenix and
Turtle has been interpreted as a specifically Christian
allegory. More generally, it may be seen as illustrating the
possibility of transcendence through love, an ideal that informs
much of Shakespeare's work, particularly the
Comedies.
The Phoenix and Turtle
does not have a literary source, although the idea of an assembly
of birds was a common one; for example, it appears in Chacuer’s
The Parliament of Fowls and a famous mock funeral in Ovid’s
Amores, to name only two great authors whom Shakespeare is known to
have read and admired. The more specific motif of love between
phoenix and turtledove was determined by its use in Robert
Chester's Love’s Martyr, a long allegorical poem celebrating the
marriage of Sir John Salisbury and his wife; Shakespeare's poem was
apparently written to be published with that work in 1601. The idea
of love between these two symbolic birds was novel, originating
with either Chester or his patron.
Salusbury and his wife are the likeliest subjects of any specific symbolism the phoenix and the turtledove may carry, in addition to their joint role as an emblem of ideal love. In addition, scholars have long speculated on possible hidden meanings in Love's Martyr and/or The Phoenix and Turtle, and various obscure references have been proposed. The two birds have been seen as Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex and as Essex and the Earl of Southhampton, among other pairings. However, such hypotheses are not provable, and in any case the poem transcends whatever particular purposes it may have had, surviving as a mystical and powerful invocation of love.