A Midsummer Night's Dream, the seasons alter

Author: William Shakespeare Year: 1600 Length: 491 characters Difficulty: demanding Public domain

One long speech carried by colons and semicolons, which trains the reach to punctuation while the eye tracks a winding sentence.

And thorough this distemperature we see The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose; And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which. And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original.

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Three children in lace ruffs and embroidered doublets, the middle one holding a small animal, Three Unknown Elizabethan Children, 1580. — Wikimedia Commons

Titania speaks these lines in the second act of A Midsummer Night's Dream, printed in quarto in 1600. Hiems, named in the speech, is the Latin word for winter used as a figure. The passage is often read as an echo of the cold wet summers England had in the middle of the 1590s. Project Gutenberg carries the complete works.

What it trainsOne long speech carried by colons and semicolons, which trains the reach to punctuation while the eye tracks a winding sentence.