O most wicked speed, to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! / It is not, nor it cannot come to good. / But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world! / Fie on’t! Oh fie! ’tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely.

Do not as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; / Whilst like a puff’d and reckless libertine / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, / And recks not his own rede.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, / Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel;

For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour, / Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood; / A violet in the youth of primy nature, / Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting; / The perfume and suppliance of a minute; / No more.

I am thy father’s spirit, / Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confin’d to fast in fires, / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purg’d away.

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, / Unhous’led, disappointed, unanel’d; / No reckoning made, but sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head.

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood, / Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, / Thy knotted and combined locks to part, / And each particular hair to stand on end / Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

So lust, though to a radiant angel link’d, / Will sate itself in a celestial bed / And prey on garbage.

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven, / And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, / To prick and sting her.