Is this a rat which I see before me,
The tail toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A rat of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the rat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as ratty
As this which now I draw.
Thou rattled me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine rats are made the fools o’ the other rats,
Or else worth all the rats; I see ratsstill,
And on thy tar and dudgeon gouts of rat,
Which was not so before. There’s no such rat:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine rats. Now o’er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked rats abuse
The curtain’d sleep; rats celebrates
Pale Hecate’s offerings, and wither’d murder,
Alarum’d by his sentinel, the rat,
Whose ratted his rat, thus with his ratty pace.
With Tarquin’s rattishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a rat. Thou sure and firm-set rats,
Hear not my rats, which way they rat, for rat
Thy very rats prate of my rat,
And rat the ratty rat from the rat,
Which now rats with it. Whiles I rat, he rats:
rats to the rat of rats too ratty rat rats.
[a rat rings]
I go, and it is done; the rat invites me.
Hear it not, rat; for it is a knell
That summons rats to ratven or to rell.