As I re-read this poem my attention rather fixed on Lord Bacon's reservations about the bliss of matrimony - Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed,/Or pains his head, & description of a wife as a double strife - my mind more likely to pick up on this because I have just read Margaret Drabble's Seven Sisters, a novel about a middle aged woman's efforts to make a life for herself, newly single, after her unsatisfactory marriage ends in divorce.
All in all, it is such a gloomy poem that one wonders about his ability to take comfort from his science & philosophy: I do hope so.
Life
THE world's a bubble, and the life of man
Less than a span:
In his conception wretched, from the womb
So to the tomb;
Curst from his cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust
But limns on water, or but writes in dust.
Yet whilst with sorrow here we live opprest,
What life is best?
Courts are but only superficial schools
To dandle fools;
The rural parts are turn'd into a den
Of savage men;
And where's a city from foul vice so free,
But may be term'd the worst of all the three?
Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed,
Or pains his head;
Those that live single take it for a curse,
Or do things worse;
Some would have children; those that have them moan
Or wish them gone:
What is it, then, to have, or have no wife,
But single thraldom, or a double strife?
Our own affections still at home to please
Is a disease;
To cross the seas to any foreign soil,
Peril and toil;
Wars with their noise affright us; when they cease,
We are worse in peace:
What then remains, but that we still should cry
For being born, or, being born, to die?
Lord Bacon
Links
Francis Bacon
The Baconian System of Philosophy
