Stoking the Shakespearean Fire.

Anyone wishing to write anything about William Shakespeare is immediately faced with a significant problem: how to say anything that has not been said before. Shakespeare's works have been blessed by some wonderful critics such as Bradley, Wilson Knight, Steiner, Coleridge and Bloom. It is quite significant that even Tolstoy, who was not particularly impressed by the English Bard, felt the need to write about him.

What I'd like to do in this post is not to propose a new interpretation of Shakespeare or his works but simply to focus on what might seem to be a minor detail but which, in my opinion, is quite revealing about Shakespeare's importance as a playwright.

In particular, I'd like to refer you to two passages from Shakespeare's tragedies:

Macbeth:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth Act 5, scene 5

Friar Laurence:
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume: the sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite:
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.
Romeo and Juliet Act 2, scene 6





The two passages quoted are central in the respective plays and one could write whole books about them.

Macbeth, faced with the knowledge of his inevitable doom and the death of his wife, urges 'the brief candle' to expire as quickly as possible. For him, life is a slow succession of tomorrows that becomes simply an unbearable and meaningless prelude to 'dusty death'. His is a clear renunciation of life.

Friar Laurence, on the other hand, looks at time in a completely different way. The explosive love of Romeo and Juliet would not be what it is if it were not like 'fire and powder, / Which as they kiss consume'. Their love is intense like fireworks, fiery like lightning which ceases to exist as soon as it is born. Still, the mature Friar urges calm and patience and preaches to the young lovers to 'love moderately' because 'long love doth so' and 'Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow'. Basically, the Friar, from his time-acquired maturity, is asking the impetuous young lovers to stop being what they are. Slowing down time would make them live longer. He is, of course, correct in sensing that their love can not be long lasting but, at the same time, he seems blind to the inevitability of such love.

Thus, Macbeth, in his despair seeks to shorten time. Friar Laurence, on the contrary, wishes to stretch time further. Both, intriguingly, speak about time using imagery of fire. For Macbeth, life is the mellow light and fire of a candle, easily extinguishable but too long-lasting. For Friar Laurence, the young lovers' love is like lightning or fireworks that ooze energy but end immediately.

It would be, to say the least, disingenuous to try to determine who, between Macbeth and the Friar, is speaking the truth about life. Literature is not simply about truth. What is particularly fascinating is how the same playwright can create such a wide range of convincing viewpoints in relation to the world. What the different characters say about time is somehow inevitable in their situation. They are both convincing in their worlds even though they might be saying different, even contradictory, things.

And this brings me to why I believe Shakespeare is a great playwright. Jorge Luis Borges compared Shakespeare to a god in that he is "everyone and yet no one". He embodies all imaginable permutations of life while not being identifiable with only one of them. This is what Keats has called Shakespeare's 'negative capability'. His language is living and dynamic poetry that carries the thoughts convincingly even if these thoughts might change both within a play and across different works. For me, Shakespeare is a great writer precisely because it is impossible to say who Shakespeare is. He lives only through his characters.

e. e. cummings

E. E. Cummings "Mt. Chocorua." Oil on canvas. Ca. 1938.


I have decided to start a blog where I can express some of my ideas and thoughts about a range of issues which I find intriguing and worth thinking about. I am lucky enough to be teaching what I love but this blog will allow me to discuss informally certain works that I cannot discuss elsewhere. I see the blog as a way of discussing films, poems, novels or life issues which I am interested in and, hopefully, anyone reading this might find the blog useful in some way, even if only to make one think. For these reasons, I do not intend to write in the formal, institutionalised voice of an academic or as a lecturer.

For this first post I thought of sharing some of my views about the poem, 'i thank you God for most this amazing' by e.e. cummings. Before anyone is shocked by the spelling (especially since I am a lecturer of English), let me point out that this is cummings's way of writing. Indeed, cummings is a poet who flaunts tradition in many ways, including the way he plays around with punctuation, sentence structure and other formal aspects of poetry. Ironically, however, this flaunting of tradition became the very signature of cummings's poetry, that which, therefore, is an expected characteristic of his work.

This is the poem in full:

i thank you God for most this amazing
e.e. cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)



I remember one of the best students I have ever taught telling me that her first encounter with the poem made her think that this is nonsense. She could not see the point of the confusing structure of the syntax. I think, however, that this is where the energy of the poem comes from.

cummings expresses the sheer enthusiasm and love of everything alive around him through language that seems to be struggling to match these feelings. It is as if the "beauty of this amazing day" is too intense to be contained in everyday language and poetry has to submit to this superior force. And yet, paradoxically, it is this same language that makes us experience this force which goes beyond language itself.

The poem obviously has a religious dimension as cummings sees "You God" (the only words deserving capital letters in the poem) as being the source of the "leaping", "true" life that surrounds us. However, the poem is not simply religious but intensely spiritual. Every day is worth celebrating as a "birthday", as a "great happening". Seeing the world around us makes us be reborn spiritually, taking us away from thoughts of death and nothingness. What cummings is describing here is not simply an appreciation of nature but an intense participation in its being, the ability to "see" and "hear" the world with our own inner self rather than simply with our senses. How can one doubt the existence of "You God", cummings asks, if one experiences this? It is an experience which shatters us with its intensity and yet also something which can give us the means of escaping nihilism and the darkness within us.

The poem is uplifting, to say the least. I am now rereading it after about 3 years precisely at a moment when I feel somewhat disheartened by events around me. I do not believe that poetry is simply something that makes us feel better. There are so many things that can make us feel better that are not poetry. However, if poetry can make us feel better, then that's another reason for reading it.

I do not think that my words about the poem are enough to describe the force of cummings's work. If they were enough, then the poem would definitely not be worth reading. I do hope, however, that this was an invitation to read the poem, to open your inner eyes and ears to it and let it speak to you. Read it aloud and let it inspire you.