OUR LITTLE LIVES ARE NAUGHT BUT WAKING DREAMS, AN LIFE BE SLEEP ...

From time to time we'll publish essays, fiction and other writing by students. All students are invited to submit their work to a teacher to be forwarded to the blog. Xavier Stone, class of 2011, wrote "Seven Ages of Man" for Ms. D'Amato's Shakespeare class. Click "read more" to see the complete poem.

Our little lives are naught but waking dreams,
An life be sleep then we be things unreal,
Who cross a cobbled path on broken wheel,
That meekly rest 'twixt seven drifting streams.

The first is well adorned with Flora's wreaths,
Its waters clear and free from stain of sin,
The Infant's glimpse of truth is set aspin,
And blown away across the hills and heaths.
This minty leaf of new experience,
The Infant's green is Nature's gold anew,
The hatching egg, the taming of the shrew,
Untouched by Hell and praised by innocence.

But soon the water paints on this leaf rot,
A fool phoenix born from Infant ash,
The clown inside makes thoughtful action rash,
Obedience resideth in him not.

The third stream is, as drifting time, a charm,
A scholar of the young but learnèd age,
Passion and thoughts of glory in him rage,
Who from his study does the world no harm.
Then dam removèd and old bindings broke,
The once well-kindled Scholar set aflame,
That like red fire consumeth all the same,
Once first he hath consumed his kindred yoke.
Th' Explorer of the road hath found new mint,
And with it glory's currency he'll coin,
The world is his 'til lockèd by his loin,
And thus a Father must begin his stint.
Like olives laid upon Atlas' peak,
The Father puts his hands beneath the sky,
For breaching limits – straying up too high,
Thou'd lose'st thy grip and meander down the creek.
But Father's life is not his only care,
For his forbidden fruit hath left its womb,
And loss of offspring digeth all men's tomb,
For th' Infant must a Father be aware.

But as the bond of Father-child groweth,
The bond a bind becometh – made of toil,
For weeding sudden's remedy for spoil,
The Warden must his Father-power showeth.
But intellect is not akin to wise,
And mint hath not the flavour that doth sage,
A gift acquirèd but through loss, in age,
The grandsire clock, the man of owl's eyes.

As Father teacheth child so learn him sire,
For innocence and fool left him of long,
The Wiseman knows all right and sees all wrong,
And must his knowledge leave ere he expire.