Thursday Week 2 of Lent
When I was a teenager I read a book that shaped my life. The book itself wasn’t much but it had a poem, a Shakespeare sonnet, right on its front page. And that poem seemed to capture an adolescent ideal that with an adolescent naivety I thought might save me:
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
Add comment March 4th, 1999