Sunday, December 8, 2019

Willful Blindness


“I do not want to see what you would show.
It doesn’t fit with how I see myself.
As one small drop would cause to overflow
The lake, that would no longer be itself,
So I should have to see me in new bounds.
I will not hear but what I hear in me,
Nor dare embrace another’s foreign sounds.
Like one small note would lead the key
Astray, and shift the nature of the song,
So I should have to hear me in new lays.
I do not want to know. You do me wrong
To weigh me with the charge to change my ways.”
            “That’s well,” I say. “Narcissus the unreceiver
            Died in the lake. It’s best to leak and be a river.”

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

On a Boat Trip


Against the vastness of the ocean wide
(A symbol of the seamless universe),
I cannot help but sense my size implied
When face to face do I and it converse.
The common trope would say I am a speck
Of senseless dust amid the cosmos’ sands;
Yet blow away each single sandy fleck,
And what is left in here but bleak rock wastelands?
One grain minutely shifts the shape of all
The rest, so one grain blown away, the rest
Rests not itself. And I’m not sand:  if small
The sea can show me, I live to attest.
   I sense, and judge, and understand; in terse,
   I am the nexus of my universe.

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Analysis of the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V


Analysis of the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V


In the prologue to Henry V, Shakespeare effectively tells us how to watch−and how to read−his plays. The prologue begins with the expression of a desire for: (1) a “Muse of fire” that could lead the poet to the pinnacle of historical truth; (2) “a kingdom for a stage”; (3) “princes to act”; and (4) “monarchs to behold” the spectacle. Since the story we are to see concerns kings, princes, and monarchs, who would be more fit to represent−and to observe−the events of the story than the actual characters involved in it? In this the poet conveys a kind of ideal for the theater, an ideal which would equate it to the world. But contrary to what might seem at first, that is not the poet’s ideal precisely, as we shall see.
            Shakespeare knows his audience is familiar with the military conquests and glory of Henry V and would therefore expect a great show, that indeed they would like to watch something as close to the real deal as possible. Yet he knows also the limitations and the true nature of his medium. If we could have “a kingdom for a stage,” then we should see the “warlike Harry” himself perform his famous deeds, but unfortunately for the audience’s unrealistic expectations we do not. So he proceeds to a captatio benevolentiae, calling them “gentles all” and begging their pardon, demeaning himself and his company as “flat unraisèd spirits” (note the pleonasm in “flat unraisèd,” meant to show greater humility), portraying his stage as an “unworthy scaffold” (rather than a “kingdom”), and asking forgiveness for being bold enough to present his audience with a paltry rendition of “so great an object.” After all, “this cockpit,” that is, his theater, cannot contain the “vasty fields of France” nor the “very” soldiers that did battle at Agincourt. Or can it?
            The word O is used three times in the text up to line 15. The first time it is clearly an interjection expressing a desire. The second time the word is used to represent the letter O itself and, by association, Shakespeare’s theater, whose shape was roughly circular. The third time it is primarily an interjection again, though Shakespeare’s “O, pardon” could also be interpreted as “pardon the O,” that is, “forgive my theater” for not being the world and moreover, as in line 15 there is reference to the round-shaped number zero, “forgive this nothing” that is my theater, my company, my play. However, as the poet will tell us in the sequence, this nothing, this O, this theater, can be all the world. “All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare says in As You Like It, and conversely a stage can be all the world, as he is telling us here. It can effectively be the globe.
            All that is required is that we let the players “on [our] imaginary forces work.” Just as a “crooked figure” may represent “a million” through the power of our imagination, so may the “ciphers,” the nothings of the theater depict this great tale. Shakespeare plays on two meanings of the word account−the reporting of events and a mathematical operation−to show us, by means of the incongruous metaphor of “ciphers in a tale,” that the procedure for reading mathematics and for reading a play is basically one and the same. It is “mak[ing] imaginary puissance.” Mathematics and the theater are both forms of representation, and merely the degree in which the power of the imagination needs to be exerted is different in each case.
            When we are watching a play, we need to “suppose” place, character, action, and time. First, the poet informs us, we must imagine that within the walls of his theater “are now confined two mighty monarchies,” and here the meaning of monarchies, by metonymy, is primarily that of “countries,” namely, England and France, as is made clear by the statement in the following two lines that their high coastlines (the “high uprearèd … fronts”) are divided by the “per’lous narrow ocean” of the English Channel. Secondarily, monarchies evidently refers to the political systems of each country. But there is yet a tertiary sense, anticipating the poet’s description of character. The word may refer to the country’s kings themselves, in conjunction with an understanding of “fronts” not as “forward-facing sides” but as “faces,” and so the lines would be painting a picture of the proud monarchs staring down each other. In the second place, we ought to “into a thousand parts divide one man,” that is, allow one actor to play multiple characters in our imagination, and perhaps also, foreshadowing the playwright’s description of action and the violence of war that is to come later in the story, to envision men being cut into pieces in battle. Next, Shakespeare asks us to visualize quite vividly and concretely the action of horses “printing their proud hoofs” in the ground, indicating to us the level of detail in which we should conceive of action. And, finally, he requests that with our thoughts we “deck our kings,” “carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,” and “turning” the sum of several years “into an hour-glass.”
            In this last entreaty, although it refers chiefly to time, the poet fuses together the diverse categories of place, character, action, and time, signaling that they are not independent one from the other. This fusion is aptly expressed in the word deck. It means first of all “to attire” and thus refers to character, but if we consider that clothing was one of the few elements of spectacle that Shakespeare materially supplied, this sense loses some of its purchase. Perhaps the poet means, by to deck, “to put on the deck of a ship,” whereby the kings could be carried “here and there,” from England to France, or “to furnish with a dais,” in which case we could imagine the kings in all their majesty on their raised platforms of state. The placing of the kings on a dais provides a setting of place, and their carrying from one country to another on a ship provides a description of action. But action occurs in time and place, and is performed by characters; and therein are compounded all the categories. We are to fill the gaps between the actions presented in the play with imagining the actions that ought to have taken place but were not shown, and likewise we should turn “th’accomplishment of many years” into a figurative “hour-glass” that can easily be handled in our minds, accelerating time to jump “o’er times” not staged, or else to compress them into the span of a few hours, to make them all revolve in the duration of the play.
            Shakespeare is telling us that, in order to properly understand a play, we need suspension of disbelief, even though this concept would only be named by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, and to “piece out [his] imperfections with [our] thoughts,” that is, to actively engage our “imaginary forces” in making the play come alive. These forces can only be worked upon in the sense of being directed or guided by the playwright and performers; the burden of imagining is under our responsibility. But to aid us in this task, the poet asks us to “admit” the character who presents the prologue as “chorus to this history.” The chorus in Greek drama often had the function of commenting on−thus helping the audience understand−the action of a play, and that is the purpose of the chorus in Henry V. In total, there are six interventions of the chorus in the play, this one being the first. And, “prologue-like,” it pleads for our patience, our gentleness, and our kindly judgment. Aside from their obvious meanings, the words patience, gently, and kindly carry as well other semantic possibilities that seem to fit the context. We need patience not only in the sense of excusing the natural limitations of the dramatic medium, but also in the etymological sense of letting ourselves be worked upon or in the sense of docility. We need to hear the play gently not only in the sense of hearing it politely or in good disposition, but also of hearing it like gentlemen−which, in Shakespeare’s time, would have presupposed a certain level of literary education. And lastly, we need to judge the performance kindly not just in the sense of doing so with kindness, but above all of judging it according to its kind or species, that is, of judging it not as actual history, but as an actual play.
            Finally, something remains to be said about the word history in the context of the prologue, and indeed of all the so-called “history plays” of Shakespeare. The first desire expressed by the poet in the prologue is “for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.” Our propensity would likely be towards taking the word invention to mean “creativity,” but etymologically it means “to come up against” or “to run into,” in venire, and therefore we would be correct rather in interpreting it as “discovery”−the discovery of the historical facts as they truly occurred. The poet mentions this discovery as the first element in a list of unrealistic desires regarding the theater, so we should be wise in not taking the first desire at face value either. It seems highly improbable that a man so intimate with stories would foolishly suppose his condensed and stylized version of a story from an already condensed and stylized chronicle could be called history in our modern sense. If he calls his plays “histories” it is not because they give scientific treatment to historical fact, but simply because they deal with historical matter, with events, factual or otherwise, from the past.

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

A Heroic Stroke


This is a quest to bring back poetry.
To bring it back from dens of hoarding dragons−
Those dragons of forsaken memory−,
Remembering folk from the elixir flagons.
So what if I’m a poor excuse for hero?
Or poet? All the fun is in the journey.
Mayhap will be occasion makes the hero,
Or else opinion and the dragons burn me;
I see few others willing to adventure
And fewer still with sense of what’s been stolen−
The singing muses in dark dragons’ denture−,
So I will have to do. Here thumps my colon:
   The throbbing ictus surges with a buzz.
   A hero is as deeds of hero does.

Thursday, May 2, 2019

Curtains

My boat has four beige sails; the sun they block
From bursting in and feeling much at home.
They won’t invite even the sharp-eyed hawk
To look in, less yet men whose feet do roam.
My boat has four beige sails, and on a sea
Of battered concrete it will freely soar,
Though standing still it is and shall still be
Until that blazes rain or men do war.
My boat has four beige sails, and when unfurled
They blow inwardly, warbling songs so subtle
That set my mind to sailing all the world,
Unminding busy men that outside scuttle.
   My boat has four beige sails, but me for crew,
   And rooted so, it sails just when I do.

Thursday, April 25, 2019

How Do I Love Me?


How do I love me? Let me list the ways.
I love me not in looking at the mirror
And seeing all the imperfections gaze
Accusing back my ugliness much clearer.
I love me not in losing days in idle
Leisure and vagary, vacant and lazy.
I love me not freely, as one unbridled.
I love me not purely, with pleasure crazy.
I love me not in passionate pursuit
Of egotistic care or pious trope.
Since I’m not eating grass yet by the root
I love me thus: for me, there’s always hope
   For me. Christ, grant me grace likewise to labor:
   As one unfinished let me love my neighbor.

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Awe Mumbles


A starless night, abysmal lightlessness,
A sailing sea of sunless, seamless nothing,
A shoreless, strandless space of nothingness,
Astounding, sole, and silent. Still of nothing
Something comes: sound! From dark, oneiric gloom
Thrums on and on the deep resounding hum
Pronouncing forth from the eternal womb
One syllable profound, prolonging: Om!
Flashes of light, red, green, and blue, the word
Blooms into Buddha. Being heard the message,
His eyes, the first, the second, and the third
Open. I’m falling in th’omphalic passage
   Into my pate. Silence. Still through all things
   The rebound of the womb on mumly sings.