Poem of the week: An Ode to Himself by Ben Jonson

‘Make not thyself a page / To that strumpet, the stage’ … Ben Jonson in c 1620. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

An Ode to Himself

Where dost thou careless lie,
Buried in ease and sloth?
Knowledge that sleeps doth die;
And this security,
It is the common moth
That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both.