Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all ? Thou 'It come no more, Never, never, never, never, never ! Pray you, undo this button : thank you, sir. The British Essayists: With Prefaces Biographical, Historical and Critical - Page 180by Lionel Thomas Berguer - 1823Full view - About this book
| Christa Jansohn - 2006 - 324 pages
...animal. Lear speaks the last words on this topic to the dead Cordelia, seconds before his own death: Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life And thou no breath at all? (5.3.305-6) This is not closure, not a clean exit, much less consolation. The seemingly random list... | |
| Janette Dillon - 2006 - 39 pages
...'this great decay' (V. 3 .2 7 1 ); for Lear, Cordelia's death makes no sense in the scheme of things ('Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all' (V.3. 280-1)); Lear's own death as he struggles to revive her merely ratchets up the suffering for... | |
| Richard Lederer - 2007 - 268 pages
...than William Shakespeare, whose dying King Lear laments: And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? . . . Do you see this? Look on her! Look! Her lips! Look there, look there! Shakespeare's contemporaries... | |
| Alma Bond - 2006 - 186 pages
...understand choosing to sleep under the sod. As King Lear said to his dead daughter, I ask you, Kendall, "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, /And thou no breath at all 112 ?" Then Ed Griffin, an ex-priest and dear writer friend told me of someone who found an answer... | |
| Sukanta Chaudhuri - 1981 - 284 pages
...disintegration after it. His last speech still reflects the starkest question in human experience: Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, And thou no breath at all? (V. iii. 306-7) By the time Lear dies, he has stretched every moral fibre to the uttermost. His very... | |
| Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen - 2007 - 238 pages
...then she lives' (5 .3.260-2). Cordelia's death is represented as the absence of such bodily signs: 'Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?' (5.3.305-6). Lear's list of animals, as a shorthand for unaccomodated physicality, recalls Lear's earlier... | |
| Thomas Howard, Vivian W. Dudro - 2007 - 372 pages
...and beauty and dignity that we call humanness should be snuffed out while mere beasts go on living. "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, /And thou no breath at all?" (IV, iii, 307), he asks, addressing the dead body of his beloved daughter Cordelia, which he carries... | |
| Kathy Coffey - 2006 - 166 pages
...other words to every parent who has lost a child. "I might have saved her; now she's gone for ever. . ..Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, /And thou no breath at all?" Tragic ordeal transformed to poetry: this is the model for any faithful life. As you begin this book,... | |
| Robert Burns Shaw - 2007 - 321 pages
...Cordelia, his extremity of emotion is suggested by the savage and systematic wrenching of the meter: Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou' It come no more, Never, never, never, never, never. Every foot is reversed in this line of "never's,"... | |
| Philip Coleman, Philip McGowan - 2007 - 310 pages
...Lear's appalling lament at the death of Cordelia in Shakespeare's most determinedly pre-Christian play: "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?"19 However, "in the beginning" recalls the opening of St John's gospel and consequently the start... | |
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