I wasted time, and now doth time waste me

I have never really read Shakespeare much but lately am finding a few lines here and there through the internet and finding great delight in his lines. Here is one from Richard II, Act V, Scene V which I found looking at some quotations about time.

When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To cheque time broke in a disorder'd string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar...

Like the poet Mark Strand writes in a book I am currently reading (The Weather of Words), poetry is not all about...

"...the dark or the unknown at the center of our experience. Some try not to, choosing to speak of what is known, of common experiences, in which humanness is most powerfully felt, experiences that we share with those who lived hundreds of years ago."

Perhaps the Bard wrote for some of us...traipsing around through life centuries later! As Strand writes later in that para:

"This is the secret life of poetry. It is always paying homage to the past, extending a tradition into the present."

Latter in the essay (which he penned as an Intro to the Best American Poetry, 1991), Strand writes:

"The way poetry has of settling our internal house in order, of formalizing emotion difficult to articulate, is one of the reasons we still depend on it in moments of crisis and during those times when it is important that we know, in so many words... Read More, what we are going through. ... Without poetry, we would have either silence or banality, the former leaving us to our own inadequate devices for experiencing illumination, the latter cheapening with generalization what we wished to have for ourselves alone, turning our experience into impoverishment, our sense of ourselves into embarrassment."

Elsewhere, Strand writes:

"… it's not that poetry reveals more about the world — it doesn't — but it reveals more about our interactions with the world than our other modes of expression. And it doesn't reveal more about ourselves alone in isolation, but rather it reveals that mix of self and other, self and surrounding, where the world ends and we begin, where we end and the world begins." 

Much delight to be sought through poetry and the words of poets!