lilies that fester - 5.2.26
Lately every chance I get I talk about Shakespeare, and everyone thinks I’m being esoteric. But it’s so clear that when the king is not functioning like a king should, everything in the country goes wrong.
And now we have suddenly become painfully aware of the effects of the war upon the children. The loss of clarity, of frameworks. and suddenly the last line of this sonnet popped into my head – of how much we believed in this land, how much potential we knew we had with it, and how, since the mood that began to grow before Rabin was murdered, we saw it festering…
Sonnet 94
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.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.