Poetry Corner
My brother, Ed, busied himself with Shakespeare at a very early age. He could quote some of his miraculous material by memory, or in conversations, or in letters.
Ed believed that Shakespeare spoke with such universality that most human foibles, conditions and virtues could be found in his writings. He warned me that Shakespeare’s lines were so compressed and tight that they had to be read over and over to uncover the several interpretations and subtlety of his language.
I put off reading Shakespeare until I was seventy-eight. Maybe I felt myself unworthy to visit such high language before I was old – now I can’t put him down. First I read five of his tragedies. Then I turned to his sonnets and memorized two of them.
Robert Bly thought that the art of writing poetry should not begin until fifty. Now, considering that the Lake Poets (Keats, Shelley, Byron) finished their prolific wealth of poetry in their thirties and died before reaching the age of forty, Bly’s comment seems a bit severe, unless he was speaking metaphorically. Perhaps he meant hyperbolically that poetry should not be sentimentalized or composed in a flippant manner. It should be composed by a person who loves words and what they mean, by someone who practices the disciplines of language, by one whose imagination has been sobered, tested and seasoned by life with wisdom and experience.
Why I kept the reading of Shakespeare until the last stage of life I now find regrettable. Sure I went to the Bard’s plays at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Seattle Repertory downtown, I heard Shakespeare recitations and saw films about his plays, but spent too little time reading him. But now that I have begun, I read him daily.
I recently read about Sir Henry Neville in Brenda James and William Rubinstein’s book, “The Truth Will Out.” They argue that Sir Henry Neville is the likely author of Shakespeare’s cumulative works. They insist that a poor actor from Stratford, with little formal education or exposure to courtly life, could hardly be England’s Bard. I recall that Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Edward de Vere were also likely candidates.
But who knows? Maybe that struggling actor from Stratford may have actually been the author. Does genius need to explain itself? Brother Ed believed that Shakespeare’s insights into the human psyche were universal and exceptional. When I first memorized his 64th sonnet on the anniversary of 9/11, I was intrigued by the similarity of his sonnet to the bombing of the two towers in New York City.
Sonnet 64
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-ras’d,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win over the wat’ry main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin has taught me thus to ruminate –
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.