Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, January 19th, 2004. Today we have a very somber speech from Shakespeare's Richard II. Thanks for hanging in there this week as we've visited some of the lesser-performed or lesser-celebrated poetic

speeches from Shakespeare's works.

This one comes from the middle of Richard II, and it's the downturn for poor Richard.

This is a play that muses upon the divine right of kings,

the conflict between political expediency and moral idealism,

and, like so many of Shakespeare's plays, all of Shakespeare's plays, what it means to be

a suffering human. Here, Richard has just learned that Henry Ballingbroke, who will become

King Henry IV, is gathering forces to himself and is successfully gaining the will of the

English people in support of his attempt to depose Richard, and that a helpful army from Wales that Richard was

counting on to bolster his own forces and fortunes is not going to arrive and come to his

aid after all.

So it seems as if his kingship is not long for this world,

and it is upon that prospect that he meditates in this speech from Act 3, Scene 2 of Richard II.

No one. scene two of Richard the second. No matter where, of comfort no man speak.

Let's talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs, make dust our paper and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

Let's choose executors and talk of wills, and yet not so, for what can we bequeath save our deposed

bodies to the ground? Our lands, our lives, and all are bawling brooks. And nothing can we call our own but death.

And that small model of the barren earth which serves as paste and cover to our bones. For God's sake,

let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.

Now, some have been deposed, some slain in war, some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,

some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed, all murdered.

But within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king, keeps death his court,

...