His displeasure! I am sure I have displeased him, he thinks. Look how he steamed and glared, that day I took a holiday. Look how he pawed the ground and rolled his eyes. This is what Henry does. He uses people up. He takes all they give him and more. When he is finished with them he is noisier and fatter and they are husks or corpses.
The Mirror and the Light, 655
The king hath eaten us alive
And we, poor semblances
Pretending at ourselves, do prate
And gamble as we used to do:
This state is nothing strange to us
That thus in paler being set alight
Our shadowed world; we say among ourselves,
Long since, we tired of all other life.
The glass he is content
To do as all his fellows do
And make the light more than it is;
How much more a lamp, and less a perfect glass
Will you become, before your end?
The Journal is a section where I post weekly poems responding to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Here’s last week’s edition:
Talk about having early lines that draw you in! Very nice job, I was hooked immediately and wanted to read the rest.