Love’s Labour’s Lost

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,

Live registered upon our brazen tombs,

And then grace us in the disgrace of death;

When spite of cormorant devouring Time,

The endeavor of this present breath may buy

That honor which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge,

And make us heirs of all eternity.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, i, 1

brazen: brass, i.e. enduring.  grace: honor.  disgrace: disfigurement, decay.  spite of : in spite of.  cormorant: ravenous.  breath: breathing-space, i.e. brief earthly life.  bate: dull

Our court shall be a little academe,

Still and contemplative in living art.

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, i, 13

academe: academy.  contemplative: showing careful thought.  living art: the art of living

O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep,

Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, i, 47

啊，這些無聊的課題，很難做到，

不看女人、讀書、齋戒、不睡覺。 barren: dull, fruitless.  fast: fasting, abstinence

Why? all delights are fain, but that most vain

Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain:

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, i, 72

pain: labor or suffering.  purchased: obtained.  inherit: possess

As, painfully to pore upon a book

To seek the light of truth, while truth the while

Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look.

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, i, 74

falsely: treacherously.  his look: its power to see

900

Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile;

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, i, 77

beguile: deprive, rob of.  Light … beguile: the eye, seeking enlightenment, deprives itself of the power to see, i.e. excessive study frustrates the search for truth by making the student blind.

Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun,

That will not be deep searched with saucy looks;

Small have continual plodders ever won,

Save base authority from others’ books.

These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights

That give a name to every fixed star,

Have no more profit of their shining nights

Than those that walk and wot not what they are.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, i, 84

Small: little.  base: commonplace.  earthly godfathers: i.e. astronomers, who give names to stars as godparents give names to children at baptism.  wot: know

900

At Christmas I no more desire a rose

Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth;

But like of each thing that in season grows.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, i, 105

new-fangled: fond of novelty or of new things.  like of:

am pleased with

, and men sit down to that nourishment which is called supper:

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, i, 236

“that unlettered small-knowing soul”--

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, i, 250

unlettered: illiterate

(with) a child of our grandmother Eve, a female; or for thy more sweet understanding, a woman.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, i, 263

sweet: good

Affliction may one day smile again; and till then, sit thee down, sorrow!

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, i, 312

Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit, write, pen, for I am for whole volumes in folio.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  I, ii, 183

Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye,

Not uttered by base sale of chapmen’s tongues.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  II, i, 15

美麗要憑買主的眼力，

不靠販夫的吆喝。 uttered: offered for sale.  chapmen’s: merchants’

A man of sovereign parts esteemed,

Well fitted in arts, glorious in arms;

Nothing becomes him ill that he would well.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  II, i, 44

sovereign: supreme.  arts: intellectual accomplishments.  would: wishes to do

A merrier man,

Within the limit of becoming mirth,

I never spent an hour’s talk withal.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  II, i, 66

Your wit’s too hot, it speeds too fast, ‘twill tire.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  II, i, 119

Warble, child; make passionate my sense of hearing.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  III, i, 1

Remuneration! O! that’s the Latin word for three farthings:

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  III, i, 136

A very beadle to a humorous sigh,

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  III, i, 175

beadle: parish officer who whipped petty offenders.  humorous: moody

This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,

This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid;

Regent of love-rimes, lord of folded arms,

The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans,

Liege of all loiters and malcontents.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  III, i, 189

(Sir,) he hath not fed of the dainties that are bred of a book;

He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink;

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  IV, ii, 24

Many can brook the weather that love not the wind.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  IV, ii, 33

許多不喜歡風的人仍然能忍耐壞天氣。 brook: endure.  The proverb means that one must put up with many things one does not like.

You two are book-men:

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  IV, ii, 34

book-man: scholar, student

910

By heaven, I do love, and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy;

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  IV, iii, 12

Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye,

‘Gainst whom the world cannot hold argument,

Persuade my heart to this false perjury?

Vows for thee broke deserve not punishment.

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  IV, iii, 58

whom: which

Young blood doth not obey an old decree.

We cannot cross the cause why we were born;

   --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  IV, iii, 213

年輕人不服從老教條。

我們不能拂逆愛； cross … born: i.e. hold out against love

For where is any author in the world

Teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye?

Learning is but an adjunct to ourself,

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  IV, iii, 308

adjunct: something annexed

But love, first learned in a lady’s eyes,

Lives not alone immured in the brain,

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  IV, iii, 324

immure: to shut somebody in a place

It adds a precious seeing to the eye:

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  IV, iii, 330

seeing: faculty of sight

    , as sweet and musical

As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair.

And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods

Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  IV, iii, 339

strung: furnished or fitted with strings.  voice: i.e. responsive songs.  drowsy: inducing sleep

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:

They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;

They are the books, the arts, the academes,

That show, contain, and nourish all the world,

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  IV, iii, 347

doctrine: learning.  Promethean: inspiring or infusing life.  academe: academy

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  V, i, 16

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  V, i, 36

scraps: food left after a meal

in the posteriors of this day, which the rude multitude call the afternoon.

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  V, i, 89

posterior: later in time.  rude: uneducated.  multitude: mass of ordinary people

Taffata phrases, silken terms precise,

Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,

Figures pedantical--

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  V, ii, 406

Taffata: taffeta. Three-piled: deep-piled, like velvet of the best quality.  pedantical: schoolmasterly

(Master,) let me take you a button-hole lower.

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  V, ii, 700

讓我對你說句掃興的話。 button-hole: humiliate, take down a peg

920

The naked truth of it is, I have no shirt;

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  V, ii, 710

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear

Of him that hears it, never in the tongue

Of him that makes it;

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  V, ii, 861

一句笑話的成功是要取決於聽者，而不是講者； jest: joke.  prosperity: success

When daisies pied and violets blue,

And lady-smocks all silver-white,

And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

Do paint the meadows with delight,

The cuckoo then on every tree

Mocks married men; for thus sings he,

“Cuckoo;

Cuckoo, cuckoo”-- O word of fear,

Unpleasing to a married ear!

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  V, ii, 894

pied: particolored.  lady-smock: a flower, possibly cuckoo-flower or stitchwort.  cuckoo-bud: a yellow flower.  word of fear: i.e. because the cuckoo’s call suggests the word cuckold

When icicles hang by the wall,

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,

And Tom bears logs into the hall,

And milk comes frozen home in pail;

When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,

Then nightly sings the staring owl,

 “Tu-whit, to-who!” --

A merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  V, ii, 912

blows his nail: blows on his finger-nails for warmth, and waits patiently while he has nothing to do.  keel: cool by stirring to keep the pot from boiling over

When all aloud the wind doth blow,

And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,

And birds sit brooding in the snow,

And Marian’s nose looks red and raw;

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

Then nightly sings the staring owl,

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  V, ii, 921

saw: moral platitude in his sermon.  roasted crabs: roasted crab apples which were added to a bowl or pot of warmed ale

The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.

  --- Love’s Labour’s Lost  V, ii, 930

harsh: rough or sharp in a way that is unpleasant