Ophelia

a poem with reference to Hamlet

Awhile, awhile, down the crooked stile
Where the flowers blossom upon skulls in the ground
And water-weeds are thick on the scalp of the stream
Awhile now, as the world waits for spring
And its sprinkles of rain, that unearth the life
From the winter mausoleum:
Watch the corpses begin to bloom.

Up on the hill a man with a spade
Grave-digger or gardener I cannot tell
Now and then he holds up a skull
Then flings it back into the furrows he’s made
To trough and plow the fertile soil.
These faces he buries, he knows none and yet all
The balding heads, the ivory pall
The common grin beneath the flesh
Are flowerpots now in the soil.

‘The play’s the thing’,
And Hamlet’s questions whispered in the wind
The actor’s lines and a hundred musings
Of what is to be or not to be
They tickle the boughs of the willow tree
Who laughs and promises that the audience leaves
Each with that happy common grin
Of a common happy ending.

The stream is lively, rife with life
The gurgling of worm-fattened fish
Glutted on a feast of kings
The rustle of the willow leaves,
Dirt sighing from a shovel.
But the distant melody of a lovelorn lady
Stops all natural sounds awhile,
Like wonder-wounded hearers
Music rising from the running stream
Dirges to the moon, songs from a dream:

Crowned with weed and flower
Ophelia drifting down the water
The sound of a name,
The kiss of thyme
On her lifting singing scarlet lips,
The flowering of rhyme.
Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies;
Good night, good night.

___________________

This poem reminds me of so many things, written in a time when I was a different person, in different circumstances and a different state of mind.

Some of my favourite verses from Hamlet; none of the befuddling riddles from the protagonist this time, but several illuminating truths in luminous verse from the Player King through whom Shakespeare speaks in pellucid style:

"The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy:
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love...

Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own..."

Hamlet strikes me so frequently as a play within a play, the literal drama involving the Player King and Queen that Hamlet stages for Claudius notwithstanding. Curiously, the personality that is Hamlet himself seems to me to merely be acting in the role of Prince Hamlet, like an actor who has put on Hamlet's shoes for fun. Yet he appears not just to be an actor of himself, but also as the director of the play he stages, wondering "to be or not to be". Like a director calling for the curtains to fall on the close of the play, his last lines in Hamlet ring with a proud finality: "The rest is silence."

The real playwright, of course, is Shakespeare.