“The Story of Narcissus” (ll) – Ovid
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Tag: William Shakespeare
June 13, 2021
Still o’er the fountain’s wat’ry gleam he stood,
Mindless of sleep, and negligent of food;
“You trees,” says he, “and thou surrounding grove,
Who oft have been the kindly scenes of love,
Tell me, if e’er within your shades did lye
A youth so tortur’d, so perplex’d as I?
No mountains rise, nor oceans flow between.
That kindly smiles, and when I bend to join
Come from thy well, thou fair inhabitant.
My charms an easy conquest have obtain’d
With equal flames, and languishes by turns.
And when my arms I stretch, he stretches his.
His eye with pleasure on my face he keeps,
He smiles my smiles, and when I weep he weeps.
When e’er I speak, his moving lips appear
To find out all the long-perplex’d deceit;
It is my self I love, my self I see;
The gay delusion is a part of me.
I kindle up the fires by which I burn,
And my own beauties from the well return.
And too much plenty makes me die for want.
How gladly would I from my self remove!
And at a distance set the thing I love.
My breast is warm’d with such unusual fire,
I wish him absent whom I most desire.
And now I faint with grief; my fate draws nigh;
Death will the sorrows of my heart relieve.
But oh! I see his fate involv’d in mine.”
May 7, 2021
Ovid / Shakespeare
“Ophelia” (1851 – 1852)
John Everett Millais
_________
for a while now, I’ve been feeling the
spirit of Ovid in many of the works of
William Shakespeare, a recent, in
some depth, project of mine, the
nearly pagan perspective in many
of his works, a lust for life, for
instance, that is not at all that of his
contemporary Protestantism, not
to mention an obvious Catholic, and
therefore potentially treacherous, at
the time, prominent bent of his
but that’s another story
many of his plays set scenes in places
right out of Roman mythology, with a
morality to match,and even character
names, Hippolyta, Hero, Polonius,
Titania, Oberon, Greek and Latin
patronyms redolent of Classical
Antiquity
here’s Ovid, for instance, from “The
Story of Narcissus”
There stands a fountain in a darksom wood,
Nor stain’d with falling leaves nor rising mud;
Untroubled by the breath of winds it rests,
Unsully’d by the touch of men or beasts;
High bow’rs of shady trees above it grow,
And rising grass and chearful greens below.
here’s Shakespeare, from his Hamlet,
Gertrude, Queen of Denmark, gives
the news of Ophelia’s death, in a
particularly Ovidian, I think, manner
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
see above
there is the influence of Dryden to
consider, it must be noted, Ovid‘s
translator into English, but the
similarity in the spirit of the text is
so great, the characteristic voice
so evident, regardless of elapsed
time, the intervening fifteen hundred
years, 8 CE for Ovid, to somewhere
around 1600 CE for Shakespeare,
for the congruence to be coincidental,
Shakespeare had to have been reading
his Ovid, imbibing it, what, do you think
then again, as Shakespeare would
have said, There are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than
are dreamt of in your philosophy
R ! chard
September 23, 2016
on art, its purpose
“Poet With Flower“ (2008)
_____
wherefore art, I’ve long and often wondered,
with only a wink to Juliet’s Romeo, for my
question dug deeper, why, indeed, itself art
we build our souls on the stories we’ve
heard, the impressions we’ve received
from voices that spoke directly to our
senses, painters with paint, musicians
with music, writers with words, poets
with poems
it started with fairy tales, which told of
right and wrong, good and bad, courage,
kindness, responsibility, and dire
consequences for discord
Biblical stories also took up a lot of my own
childhood, Jesus, Adam and Eve, Moses
and the Ten Commandments, this last
reinforced by Cecil B. DeMille’s epic
but soon enough it was Oliver Twist, Little
Nell, and by an inescapable authorial leap,
since these were all by an irresistible
Charles Dickens for a guy my age, Sydney
Carton, who valiantly stands in for his
friend, Charles Darnay, at the guillotine, a
quantum, even existential, leap from
Peter Pan and Mary Poppins
though I had the good fortune to learn to
read and write music as a boy, play music,
learn about Bach, Brahms and Beethoven,
it didn’t take anyone else much more than
their enthusiasm to see what the Beatles
were similarly doing, the Rolling Stones,
the Supremes, they were not only singing,
but making history, shaping it, and us, we
followed the questions they rose, their
responses, the effects upon ourselves
for nothing is considered until it’s
mentioned, spoken, made clear, and they
were those prophets
the same goes for art, we see as we see
cause Monet, Picasso, Warhol showed
us how to see, what to look at
and of course poets, Shakespeare,
Rostand, Dante, Goethe, to inform, each,
their individual language, and culture
I have been Philip Carey, Scarlett O’Hara,
Blanche Dubois, Gary Cooper in “High
Noon“, both Martha and George in
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf“, lately
I’ve been even Hank Williams
as Babette would say, a French doll who
gets abducted in “Raggedy Ann and Andy:
A Musical Misadventure“, an animated
movie from the Seventies, – oo aahrr yoo
Richard
psst: all of them have been me too,
incidentally
September 3, 2016
” Shakespeare and Politics”- Professor Paul Cantor
“On The Waterfront. Set Design For Shakespeare’s Drama
“The Merchant Of Venice”“ (1920)
Alexandre Benois
________
though this recommendation might seem
erudite, esoteric, indeed eccentric, if not
even improbable, I vaunt this invaluable
series to the stars, Professor Paul Cantor,
of the University of Virginia, speaking from
Harvard, however, here, shines such
glorious light on the already extraordinary
Shakespeare so as to make him the equal
of very Beethoven, poets of nearly
supernatural ability
Professor Paul Cantor views Shakespeare
through Shakespeare’s understanding of
politics, comparing his political settings –
commercial Venice, imperial Rome,
medieval and Renaissance England,
Denmark under a Christian king – to not
only shed light on those individual
political systems alive at a time when
democracy was being born, but as well
on Shakespeare’s own unexpectedly
probing philosophical insights in the
matter of governance, right up there
with John Locke and Machiavelli
who’d ‘o thunk it
the professor is engaging throughout, his
information entirely absorbing, you’ll come
out a new wo/man
the lectures are not short at an hour, twenty
minutes, I break to powder my nose, get a
a glass of wine, even answer the phone to,
of course, preferred only parties, but have
been returning addictively daily
it’s a heady indeed addiction
Richard
September 28, 2013
Sonnet 128 – William Shakespeare
How oft when thou, my music, music play’st,
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers when thou gently sway’st
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap,
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,
Whilst my poor lips which should that harvest reap,
At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand!
To be so tickled, they would change their state
And situation with those dancing chips,
O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more bless’d than living lips.
Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.
William Shakespeare
it would not be incorrect to suppose that the
“wood” of which Shakespeare speaks here
is his own and not that of the instrument,
you’ll probably even enjoy the poem more
that way, which is to say for its saucy, not
to mention, unexpected and, ahem,
protracted allegory
you might also note the equally raffish
use of the word “jacks”
enjoy
Richard
October 31, 2012
happy hallowe’en
just in time a brew to invigorate the season,
courtesy of Shakespeare
Richard
_________________
(from “Macbeth”, act IV, scene 1)
Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights hast thirty one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
William Shakespeare
April 29, 2010
“Trouble” – Matthew Dickman
after the great hiatus of the Middle Ages Descartes declared “I think, therefore I am“, and set the modern world in motion, the Age of Reason, the Era of Human Rights
but even Shakespeare some seventy years earlier had given voice already to the consequent existential dilemma, by way of Hamlet in his “To be, or not to be“, the moral dilemma of the individual before existence – “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” – and the abyss of eternity, a question up to that point forbidden on dire pain of heresy
Emily Dickinson touches on the subject famously, others also of equal authority, but here is something I thought true, touching, beautiful, and ultimately inspiring for anyone who’s delved that deep
Richard
______________________
Trouble
Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills
to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter
hung in the Tahitian bedroom
of her mother’s house,
while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes
you can look at the clouds or the trees
and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.
The performance artist Kathy Change
set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves
out of the music industry forever.
I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears. The French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped
from an apartment window into the world
and then out of it. Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead
roles, leaped off the “H” in the HOLLYWOOD sign
when everything looked black and white
and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932. Ernest Hemingway
put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho
while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree
and overdosed on phenobarbital. My brother opened
thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body
until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like
the way geese sound above the river. I like
the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.
Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter
brought her roses when she was still alive,
and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite
in his own mouth
though it took six hours for him
to die, 1887. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned
and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf. If you are
travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially
on a train. Andrew Martinez, the nude activist, died
in prison, naked, a bag
around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer
Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.
Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues
after drawing a hot bath,
in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.
Larry Walters became famous
for flying in a Sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled
weather balloons. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet
and then he landed. He was a man who flew.
He shot himself in the heart. In the morning I get out of bed, I brush
my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
I want to be good to myself.
Matthew Dickman
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