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greatpoetryI'm looking for any poems about Shakespeare and his works; I read Hamlet again recently and then a friend gave me the Carl Sandburg poem below, and now I really want to know what else is out there! In return, I offer the two I've found so far.
They All Want To Play Hamlet by Carl Sandburg
They all want to play Hamlet.
They have not exactly seen their fathers killed
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,
Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,
Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,
Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of the flowers--O flowers,
flowers slung by a dancing girl--in the saddest play the inkfish, Shakespeare,
ever wrote;
Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad and to
stand by an open grave with a joker's skull in the hand and then to say over
slow and say over slow wise, keen, beautiful words masking a heart that's
breaking, breaking,
This is something that calls to their blood.
They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be
particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.
Elegy of Fortinbras by Zbigniew Herbert
for C.M.
Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippers
You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
there will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums drums I know nothing exquisite those will be my manoeuvres before I start to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit
Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe
Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial
Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy
It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince
They All Want To Play Hamlet by Carl Sandburg
They all want to play Hamlet.
They have not exactly seen their fathers killed
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,
Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,
Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,
Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of the flowers--O flowers,
flowers slung by a dancing girl--in the saddest play the inkfish, Shakespeare,
ever wrote;
Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad and to
stand by an open grave with a joker's skull in the hand and then to say over
slow and say over slow wise, keen, beautiful words masking a heart that's
breaking, breaking,
This is something that calls to their blood.
They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be
particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.
Elegy of Fortinbras by Zbigniew Herbert
for C.M.
Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippers
You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
there will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums drums I know nothing exquisite those will be my manoeuvres before I start to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit
Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe
Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial
Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy
It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 09:43 pm (UTC)And here's Romeo and Juliet by Richard Brautigan :
If you will die for me,
I will die for you
and our graves will be like two lovers washing
their clothes together
in a laundromat
If you will bring the soap
I will bring the bleach.
One of my favorite musicians, Josh Ritter, also refers to Hamlet a lot in his lyrics; one of his albums is called "So Runs the World Away", after this line : “Why, let the stricken deer go weep, the heart ungalled play; for some must watch, while some must sleep: so runs the world away.” In his song "Right Moves", he quotes from the To Be or Not to Be speech, and in "Thin Blue Flame", he refers to "the Prince of Denmark's father still and quiet".
Hope this helps!
no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 10:03 pm (UTC)And I've heard vaguely of Josh Ritter before, but I'll definitely have to check him out now.
Shakespearean Sonnet - R.S. Gwynn
Date: 2011-02-16 10:37 pm (UTC)A boy and girl love while their families fight.
A Scottish king is murdered by his host.
Two couples get lost on a summer night.
A hunchback murders all who block his way.
A ruler's rivals plot against his life.
A fat man and a prince make rebels pay.
A noble Moor has doubts about his wife.
An English king decides to conquer France.
A duke learns that his best friend is a she.
A forest sets the scene for this romance.
An old man and his daughters disagree.
A roman leader makes a big mistake.
A sexy queen is bitten by a snake.
Re: Shakespearean Sonnet - R.S. Gwynn
Date: 2011-02-21 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 10:43 pm (UTC)In Shakespeare
James Richardson
In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect. People confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
because they panic and can’t feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, and die—yes, finally—in glad pain.
You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy.
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice. Your children are lost,
they come back, you don’t remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life. Oh God, it’s all so realistic
I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.
Such a relief, to burst from the theatre
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who’s who and what’s what,
and command with Metrocards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor,
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains,
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.
***
And this one, which I love:
Three Songs for King Leir
Ann Lauinger
Note: In Shakespeare's sources, the old king and his daughter survive.
1. Cordeilla
Where nothing grew I set a knot of herbs,
Wholesome plants -- hyssop, thyme, rue.
Afternoons, he dozes in the sweet air.
Against the stone walls I espaliered roses.
I have watched the bees, flashing gold
While he sleeps, halo his white hair.
Green throat of summer, you are only a flourish
Of my sole monarch, my familiar root.
Nothing begets in me; I am nothing's heir,
Impatient to come into my kingdom. When the bees,
Blurring like smoke, sail off to hive themselves
In oak, when soil and stone are laid bare
I seat him by the fire, steady the cup
As he drinks, rub his feet. Then there are
His hair and beard to trim, his nails to pare.
2. Leir
Unstring the harp
Beat the hedges
Rid me of the lark
Thrush linnet
They will not
Peace at my bidding
Their music kills me
Let fall
When I would sleep
The nightingale sings
No cause, no cause
Find out who taught her
Whip him straight
She should be Gorgon-voiced
So I a man of stone
Her music kills me
Let fall
He that catches me
A pair of crickets
To scrape their legs
When I am merry
Or a leathern bat
Shall squeak me lullabye
I will thank him
For my music
Let fall
3. Edgar
Who can I tell? I miss my disguises.
Simply myself, I shall never be as wise as
Poor Tom or as strong as the Black Knight
Avenging Father's eyes, thwarting his suicide.
My clumsy self, briefly without a part,
Blurted out truth and stopped the old man's heart.
I hereby vow, for all the old men's sake,
To banish truth. Life is a dream; we wake
Only to execution. The old king
Shall not so much as stub a toe. Nothing
Arresting, unyielding, not the mildest friction
Shall touch him. Grant me, gods, the gift of fiction.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 05:47 pm (UTC)And thank you for the book recommendation! My library, unfortunately, doesn't have, but I'll track it down somehow!
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 05:47 pm (UTC)SHAKESPEARE – Matthew Arnold
Date: 2011-02-16 10:58 pm (UTC)We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill
That to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the Heaven of Heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil”d searching of mortality:
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
Self-school`d, self-scann”d, self-honoured, self-secure,
Didst walk on the earth unguessed at. Better so!
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow,
Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.
Re: SHAKESPEARE – Matthew Arnold
Date: 2011-02-21 05:49 pm (UTC)A Few Titles To Look Into...
Date: 2011-02-16 11:17 pm (UTC)"The Dark Lady Learns That Her Eyes Are Nothing Like The Sun" by Mary Holtby
"Lady Macbeth on the Psych Ward" by Kelly Cherry
"Gertrude to Hamlet" by Lee Upton
"On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again" by John Keats (Loosely; this one is more about his reaction than the play itself)
Re: A Few Titles To Look Into...
Date: 2011-02-21 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 11:25 pm (UTC)Melissa Kirsch
Everyone worships the daughters,
skirts the shade of cake frostings, Teflon
idolettes, pedicured, hemophiliac
overpretties, laughing on the inside.
The boys are corn-fed and prep-schooled,
mirror-stuck, the milksops! Woe
unto the boldest of them, for who-so-
ever shall venture to pen a verse
for a Lear girl’s hand let him
wither, unaided, in locker rooms,
let him be caught with his hand down his trousers.
The king is aware that parenting is a loose science,
performed by foglight, and so forgives himself.
He too was barely tended to, was made and then undone.
Who’s Lear’s daddy? He was a bastard, a salty dog.
Dear Cordelia. The boys would still like to press
a peony behind her ear, pack up her petticoats,
and take her away to somewhere-upon-somewhere.
Even penniless, there’s something so irresistible
about a girl with nothing to prove.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 11:29 pm (UTC)Carol Ann Duffy
‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed…’
(from Shakespeare’s will)
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 01:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 05:11 am (UTC)by Maxine Kumin
And suppose the darlings get to Mantua,
suppose they cheat the crypt, what next? Begin
with him, unshaven. Though not, I grant you, a
displeasing cockerel, there's egg yolk on his chin.
His seedy robe's aflap, he's got the rheum.
Poor dear, the cooking lard has smoked her eye.
Another Montague is in the womb
although the first babe's bottom's not yet dry.
She scrolls a weekly letter to her Nurse
who dares to send a smock through Balthasar,
and once a month, his father posts a purse.
News from Verona? Always news of war.
Such sour years it takes to right this wrong!
The fifth act runs unconscionably long.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 10:04 pm (UTC)and a serious one: (better translation in comments): http://med-cat.livejournal.com/180125.html
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 10:13 pm (UTC)Tennyson's Mariana is about a character in Measure for Measure.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-06 02:16 pm (UTC)