I’m taking a course on Shakespeare and we discussed Romeo and Juliet through the lens of the sonnet format. This led me to recall a favorite sonnet, found in Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers:
Here, then, at home, by no more storms distrest,
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled,
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.
Lay on thy whips, O Love, that me upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,
Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,
450 years after the birth of one of the world’s most influential and often-quoted writers, it’s still astonishing to realize just how much of our perception of the major figures of that time is influenced by Shakespeare’s writings. Until the discovery of the skeleton of deposed usurper Richard III, there was no solid evidence that he had any kind of physical deformity, yet we all think of him as the hideous hunchbacked demon of the play RICHARD III. Representations of Henry VIII’s “Great Matter” are still colored by Shakespeare’s depiction of events, especially the infamous moment in the Blackfriars court when Katherine, called by the bailiff, instead kneeled at her husband’s feet and made an impassioned plea, then got up and left. There is some contemporary evidence for this, but still – what a great moment for a playwright to use.
Shakespeare was writing the sixteenth-century equivalent of propaganda films. They’re entertainment, first and foremost, but he’s careful to ally himself with the side that won at Bosworth Field in 1485.
We still revere Henry V, and think of Agincourt because of the play. Yes, he appears to have been the medieval ideal – young, handsome, militarily successful – but he also continued decades of war and then conveniently died before he could solidify his winnings. England spent the next 150 years steadily retreating from France.
In some ways, I think it’s a pity Shakespeare never got the chance to write about the Stuart kings. Imagine what he could have done with Charles I.
Without further commentary, I present to you this famous monologue from HENRY VIII:
KATHERINE: Sir, I desire you do me right and justice,
And to bestow your pity on me; for
I am a most poor woman and a stranger,
Born out of your dominions: having here
No judge indifferent, nor no more assurance
Of equal friendship and proceeding. Alas, sir,
In what have I offended you? What cause
Hath my behavior given to your displeasure
That thus you should proceed to put me off
And take your good grace from me? Heaven witness,
I have been to you a true and humble wife,
At all times to your will conformable,
Even in fear to kindle your dislike,
Yea, subject to your countenance–glad or sorry
As I saw it inclined. When was the hour
I ever contradicted your desire
Or made it not mine too? Or which of your friends
Have I not strove to love, although I knew
He were mine enemy? What friend of mine
That had to him derived your anger, did I
Continue in my liking? nay, gave notice
He was from thence discharged? Sir, call to mind
That I have been your wife in this obedience
Upward of twenty years, and have been blest
With many children by you. If in the course
And process of this time you can report,
And prove it too, against mine honor aught,
My bond to wedlock, or my love and duty
Against your sacred person, in God’s name
Turn me away, and let the foul’st contempt
Shut door upon me, and so give me up
To the sharp’st kind of justice. Please you, sir,
The king your father was reputed for
A prince most prudent, of an excellent
And unmatched wit and judgment. Ferdinand,
My father, King of Spain, was reckoned one
The wisest prince that there had reigned by many
A year before. It is not to be questioned
That they had gathered a wise council to them
Of every realm, that did debate this business,
Who deemed our marriage lawful. Wherefore I humbly
Well, it’s April again, and that means it’s National Poetry Month here in the United States. I’ve been pondering what to do about it this year, since I’m really not much of a poetry reader. The ones I’ve posted over the past two years are really the ones that come to mind when I think of poems I like.
But it occurred to me that I have spent nearly half my life in choirs, and listen to a lot of music. So this month I’m starting with songs and seeing where they take me.
This first poem is going to seem like an immediate contradiction of the plan to post different texts that have been set to music, but bear with me.
During my senior year of high school, I joined a choir that was intense and amazing and challenging. One of the pieces we tackled was a setting of Sara Teasdale’s poem “There Will Be Rest.” Eventually it proved too challenging even for us, and after only one or two attempts during concerts the director removed it from our repertoire. Indeed, one of those attempts stands out in my mind as a spectacular failure – the high voices, the sopranos and tenors, pushed so sharp that eventually the entire soprano section had to drop out. Not good!
But in my memory the poem and the music shimmer gently, like dewdrops on a spiderweb or the way starlight is sometimes set to music. And it’s this great unattained milestone in my mind, so I’ve never forgotten it. I went to poets.org to try and find the poem again.
Instead, I found this other one by Sara Teasdale that left my jaw on the floor.
I Am Not Yours
by Sara Teasdale
I am not yours, not lost in you, Not lost, although I long to be Lost as a candle lit at noon, Lost as a snowflake in the sea.
You love me, and I find you still A spirit beautiful and bright, Yet I am I, who long to be Lost as a light is lost in light.
Oh plunge me deep in love — put out My senses, leave me deaf and blind, Swept by the tempest of your love, A taper in a rushing wind.
This perfectly verbalizes something that’s happened to me a few times now. I find myself involved with someone who’s good and kind and funny and by all accounting someone who is a great match for me, and I desperately wish I was more attracted to him.
It happens to everyone at some point, and it’s so difficult. We want the fairy tale romance, to be swept off our feet and let the world fall away, but modern cynicism says that’s not possible. Except people keep writing about it, so it must happen to someone, right?
There’s this popular idea that if you have to stop and think about it, you haven’t been in love. And anyone who’s been in love will tell you that for a while at least the world DOES fall away.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings; How some have been deposed; some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed; Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d; All murder’d: for within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks, Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life, Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus Comes at the last and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
— Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2, William Shakespeare
George R. R. Martin’s sprawling fantasy epic A Game of Thrones is wildly popular – both the books and the critically-acclaimed television series. You really have to try to avoid having heard of one or the other, at least. Both have been recommended to me several times by many people. The theory is that I love fantasy literature (I did manage to get academic credit for studying The Lord of the Rings and related Tolkien works no less than three times) and I enjoy the kind of pseudo-feudal world Martin has created. Both are to some extent true, though I begin to suspect my preference is for specific authors’ creations rather than the genre as a whole.
I’ve tried watching the television show. It was well-done, I freely acknowledge that, and I greatly admire the performances of actors like Peter Dinklage and Emilia Clarke. But I felt no great drive to continue watching after the first episode or two. So I didn’t.
I’ve tried reading the book – in fact, I am about 100 pages into my fourth attempt to read the first book in the series. Each time I have gotten about 200-250 pages in and lost interest. Even though I know I’ll never have time to read all the books in the world, the fact that I have so little interest in reading a well-written (if ridiculously LONG) series of fantasy novels that are so popular kind of rankles. Perhaps this time I’ll finally give myself permission to stop trying.
Part of my disinterest is that most of my reading material is nonfiction, and has been for several years now. After all, why read Game of Thrones, featuring the struggles between the houses of Stark and Lannister (and others), when I can read about the REAL, historical game of thrones, featuring the struggles between the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne of England? Also, seriously, Mr. Martin, you didn’t even TRY to be subtle on that, did you?
For the past four nights I’ve watched one of each of the four plays of Shakespeare’s Henriad, the tetralogy that covers the last gasp of the Hundred Years’ War and the start of the Wars of the Roses in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. In 2012, the BBC created four films of the plays and released it for television under the title THE HOLLOW CROWN. From Richard II through Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, and concluding with the brief flash of military glory that is Henry V, the series is breathtaking. Indeed, there were entire scenes during which I’m not sure if I was breathing.
The cast lineup is phenomenal – performances by Patrick Stewart, Julie Walters, David Suchet, Richard Griffiths, Clemence Poesy, Rory Kinnear, John Hurt, Geoffrey Palmer, Maxine Peake, James Purefoy, and many others are all wonderful. Jeremy Irons turns in a masterful performance as the aged and unwell Henry IV, burdened by the guilt of his usurpation years earlier. One of the things they did to make this such a personal, moving, gripping production was to continue the trajectory of the masters’ evolution in filmed Shakespeare. Laurence Olivier declaimed his speeches as though onstage in a very traditional kind of theater. Decades later comes Branagh, who speaks Shakespearean English as though it is his natural manner of speaking, but still the great powerful speeches are meant to rouse the troops, and they come smoothly, as if practiced. In THE HOLLOW CROWN, some speeches are done as voiceover, such as Henry V’s prayer before the beginning of the battle at Agincourt, or Falstaff’s speech about honor at the end of Henry IV, Part 1. The intention and effect is to seem not just like that’s how the actors normally speak, but as if they’re coming up with the lines on the spot. It is, for lack of a better word, vernacular in style.
In spite of the fact that Irons gets top-of-the-top billing, the three performances to watch for are Ben Whishaw as Richard II, Simon Russell Beale as John Falstaff, and Tom Hiddleston as Prince Hal/Henry V. Beale’s was recognized by the director of the two parts of Henry IV as one of the best, if not THE best, of the past century.
I’d never actually seen any of these plays all the way through, though I read Henry IV, Part 1 in college and have seen parts of Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. My impression of Falstaff as a character was fat, drunk, comic relief. I hadn’t understood from my earlier reading that the man’s a weasel. He’s a lying, cheating, thieving coward. Literally. It is incredibly difficult to feel any kind of sympathy for him, and yet, at the end of Henry IV, Part 2 when he tries to rejoin the newly-crowned Henry V’s company only to be publicly, harshly repudiated, you do feel grieved for him. In Beale’s performance you see a man who is stunned as if struck a heavy blow. Falstaff suddenly looks old, scared, and confused. At first he is in denial, believing he’ll be sent for privately, but then he and his companions are all arrested. By the start of Henry V he’s a defeated man, and though he has no lines in the play, is said to have died of a broken heart.
Tom Hiddleston, known to many of my friends as Loki from THE AVENGERS charts the young prince’s transformation from what can only be described as a fifteenth-century frat-boy to the ideal medieval king – young, athletic, and militarily victorious. He looks the part, too. Instead of trying to look like the extant portraits of Henry V, which feature the frankly unflattering haircut reproduced by Branagh in his version, the film’s designers worked with what they have, which is a man who at times looks like energy personified and at other times looks as though he might have been carved from marble, so perfect are the angles in his face. His pale eyes laugh at times, look sad at others, and can blaze and pierce you right through the screen.
The winning performance, however, is Ben Whishaw, who dives headfirst into the complicated role of doomed king Richard II. Richard II is one of the more troubling medieval kings of England. He ascended the throne as a child, and dealt with the Peasant’s Revolt at something like age fourteen. And yet he was not hugely popular as an adult. He was considered extravagant, morally questionable, and in short, the barons did not entirely approve of him. Even Shakespeare is unable to make him all sympathetic or all wicked. This is no Richard III, in which you know who the bad guy is. Richard II is all shades of grey. In fact, it was originally titled “The Tragedy of King Richard II,” and he is indeed a tragic character. In one analysis I read, the author writes, “Pathetic and yet too self-conscious to be entirely tragic, sincere and yet engaged in acting his own sincerity, possessed of true feeling and elaborately artificial in expressing it, Richard is the distant predecessor of more than one hero of the mature tragedies, who suffer in acute self-consciousness and whose tragedy expresses itself in terms that clearly point to the presence of the weakness that has been, in part, its cause.”
Whishaw’s performance is redolent with the air of otherworldliness that you see in someone like Michael Jackson – he is always on stage, always acting a part, and not entirely on the same wavelength as other humans. And yet you sense that in spite of the magnified presentation, his feelings are real and deep. In the making-of featurette to Richard II, the actor and the director spoke of Richard’s sense of himself as an almost messianic figure, and they worked with that. The image of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows also arises more than once, and the production does an admirable job of never quite straying into heavy-handed religious imagery. It’s there, it’s impossible to miss, but you don’t feel like it’s beaten into you.
This is an extraordinary set of films. I heartily recommend it. I suspect I will be returning to it to watch it many more times.
One last poem, as we head out of April and National Poetry Month into May, which has all kinds of other things going on in it.
Elizabethan poet and dramatist Thomas Dekker wrote this poem, which was originally published in The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1600). Due to his lack of reliable patronage, most of his work has been lost, but Shoemaker’s Holiday is acknowledged as Dekker’s masterpiece. It’s a portrait of contemporary London life, and like most of Dekker’s work, tends towards the comic and the romantic.
I wonder who the Peg is in the poem. Peg is a nickname for Margaret – and it must be a character in Shoemaker’s Holiday, though I can’t find any mention of a Peg or a Margaret in the brief Wikipedia synopsis. Saucy little poem, this.
THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY
by: Thomas Dekker
THE month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!
O, and then did I unto my true love say,
Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer’s Queen.
Now the nightingale, the pretty nightingale,
The sweetest singer in all the forest quire,
Entreats thee, sweet Peggy, to hear thy true love’s tale:
Lo, yonder she sitteth, her breast against a brier.
But O, I spy the cuckoo, the cuckoo, the cuckoo;
See where she sitteth; come away, my joy:
Come away, I prithee, I do not like the cuckoo
Should sing where my Peggy and I kiss and toy.
O, the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green;
Between a trip East for an extended-family gathering and a vicious cold, I’m a little behind my preferred posting schedule of at least once a week.
Here’s another poem for you all. It’s a little cliche, perhaps, but I love it.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
At this point, nearly everyone seems to have a basic idea of the legend of King Arthur. The ideas of Camelot, the Round Table, and knights driven by the ultimate code of chivalry are widely recognized. Over the centuries, the story has incorporated other elements, like the quest for the Holy Grail that involves the Fisher King and can only be completed by a knight of pure virtue. There’s also the story of Arthur’s nephew/son Mordred, who delivers Arthur’s fatal wound and brings about the end of the Camelot age. And, of course, the adulterous romance of Guinevere and Lancelot.
Arthurian legends have fascinated and entranced for centuries. Aside from being great stories, they illustrate powerful and intensely human emotions like envy, jealousy, love, ambition, and the struggle to maintain virtuous behavior. Arthur the Welsh warlord/prince/king appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century book History of the Kings of Britain, as well as serving as a peripheral character in some of the stories of the Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh folklore that is still one of the most confusing books I’ve ever read. Sometimes it works well to translate texts from bardic poetry into prose, and other times a lot gets lost in translation.
The Victorians were notoriously obsessed with Arthurian legend, thanks in great part to Tennyson’s poem “Idylls of the King.” There are volumes and volumes of scholarly analysis of the Arthur obsession. I’m not here to write about that this time.
I prefer another of Tennyson’s Arthur-related poems, though I have to admit it’s mostly because I like the way the Canadian singer Loreena McKennitt interpreted it. The Lady of Shalott, especially as interpreted by McKennitt, is a strange combination of matter-of-fact and devastating.
Lying, robed in snowy white That loosely flew to left and right— The leaves upon her falling light— Thro’ the noises of the night She floated down to Camelot: And as the boat-head wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her singing her last song, The Lady of Shalott.
Heard a carol, mournful, holy, Chanted loudly, chanted lowly, Till her blood was frozen slowly, And her eyes were darken’d wholly, Turn’d to tower’d Camelot. For ere she reach’d upon the tide The first house by the water-side, Singing in her song she died, The Lady of Shalott.
–From The Lady of Shalott, by Alfred Lord Tennyson
The past and present wilt — I have fill’d them, emptied them, And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper? Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
— Part 51 From “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
I’ve seen this quoted a couple times in different places, and it’s that middle bit, that third thought, that always grabs my attention.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I’m not sure what it is about this that fascinates me, though I gather from my google search for the whole poem section that it’s a pretty popular quote from “Song of Myself.”
I haven’t read much Whitman, though the few bits I’ve read have always struck me as strangely disjointed, as though it was written by several people who didn’t really communicate well with each other. Maybe that’s what this small stanza is supposed to refer to.
But I do think that it’s a succinct definition of what it means to be human. We talk about teenagers and young adults trying to figure themselves out, trying to work out who they are and who they will be. I’m not sure if, at 26, I still count as a “young adult” or if I’m just an “adult” now (probably depends on who’s describing me and how much older than I am they are!).
What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think the process of figuring ourselves out ever ends. I can say some things definitively about how I am now, but I know deep down that there’s no guarantee of permanence. Some things seem likely to stick around, since they’ve been true for as long as I can remember – I like having a lot of quiet time, I don’t like crowds, I sometimes have trouble controlling my temper – but others may change. I mean, I remember at age six or seven gagging on pickles or mushrooms. I still don’t exactly love mushrooms, but I can eat them without being sick.
I’m reminded a little of a particularly troublesome question of Spanish-language grammar with which I struggled when I first started trying to learn Spanish in middle school. My school experience had, shall we say, limited lessons that were clearly about grammar rules. The topic tended to get worked into other things and we picked up a lot through osmosis and example. Spanish class was the first time I had to sit and work through clearly written-out rules of grammar, and I was puzzled by the concept of what the teacher called “the verb ‘to be.'” This got worse when I discovered that Spanish has two different verbs that mean “to be.”
Estar and ser have the same literal meaning, but they are more complicated. The primary distinction between them, as I understand it, is in permanence. For instance, you would use “ser” when identifying yourself, because in theory your name is permanent. Let’s leave aside the question of stolen identities/legal name changes/witness protection for right now and just go with the simple idea that your name is permanent. On the other hand, “estar” would be used for a temporary state, like being cold or hungry or excited. Those things will pass.
In defining ourselves, we often encounter contradictions that can range from the slightly disconcerting through embarrassing and all the way to insurmountable. But then, we are large, and contain multitudes.
A few years ago, I reconnected with a friend from high school I hadn’t seen since I graduated. It didn’t take long for him to tell me I hadn’t changed a bit, and I’m still surprised by the vehemence of my reaction. The girl he knew in high school is still within me, but I am not only her anymore. I can’t reconcile all I’ve experienced, both good and bad, in the years since high school with the idea that I haven’t changed.
The eighteen-year-old version of me is still there, inside 26-year-old me, and she makes an appearance sometimes. It’s not like rings in a tree – those are too static for the feeling that I can look back at how I was at eighteen, twelve, ten, or six, and call that self to the surface for a moment.
What can I say, other than:
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I’d like to admit something that may come as a surprise, given my postings for National Poetry Month last year and this year.
I don’t read poetry. Not really. Other than a brief foray into Edmund Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” this fall and an equally short glance at Shakespeare’s sonnets a little further back, I haven’t sat down to read a poem since junior year of college when I read Seamus Heaney’s translation of “Beowulf.”
The poetry I encounter most comes with music attached. And so, for the rest of National Poetry Month, I’m going to post favorite song lyrics. Some were written to be songs from the start, while others began as traditional poems and found themselves set to music later on.
I’d like to begin with one of the latter type, a poem/song that is now often found in Jewish services and prayerbooks.
Hanna Szenes was a freedom fighter and partisan during World War II. In 1944 she and some compatriots parachuted into Yugoslavia to help rescue Hungarian Jews from being deported to Auschwitz. She was arrested at the Hungarian border, imprisoned, tortured, and eventually executed by firing squad. Her diaries and other writings have been published and some have been widely used, including the poem I’m featuring today. In fact, this poem is used to close some versions of SCHINDLER’S LIST.
אלי, אלי
אלי, אלי, שלא יגמר לעולם
החול והים
רשרוש של המים
ברק השמים
תפילת האדם
Eli, Eli, Shelo yigamer l’olam:
Hachol v’hayam
Rishrush shel hamayim
B’rak hashamayim
T’filat ha’adam.
My God, My God, I pray that these things never end,