This is the last in my three part series on Shakespeare, but perhaps it should have been my first since Shakespeare started his expansive writing career as a poet before he became a playwright. And in the year of 1593 he published his first long narrative poem of 199 stanzas “Venus and Adonis” a poem about the Goddess of Love who kin the words of Shakespeare “She is Love, she loves and yet is not loved” by the object of her ardent affections the handsome hunter Adonis.

Shakespeare wrote five such lengthy narrative poems in all, all of which were met with critical acclaim by the literary scholars of the day including the story of the “Rape of Lucrece” a story of lust, rape and revenge. Thus Shakespeare was an apt and intense story teller from the beginning.

But where Shakespeare really shines is in his mastery of the sonnet, A sonnet is a highly structured poem of 0nly 14 lines with an ABAB rhyme scheme in the body of the poem in perfect iambic pentameter and ending in a couplet of two lines with a CC rhyme scheme, the last two lines rhyming with each other. This particular form of poetry had it’s beginnings in the country of Italy but was adopted by the poets of England sometime in the middle ages. And although the subject matter was always about a man’s love for a perfect woman, the form had evoled to be about various subjects by Shakespeare’s time. For example in Shakespeare’s famous sonnet number 18 he compares a young man’s beauty to the beauty of summer which, unlike the season of summer, he makes eternal in the classic lines of his ;poem.

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
By William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

So Shakespeare, of course, brought this form of poetry to it’s highest level, and this particular poem had that Wow factor for me. No wonder Shakespeare was considered the national poet of England and was dubbed the “Bard of Avon.” He wrote 154 sonnets, 5 book length narrative poems and about 37 plays in all, and he is a must read for English speaking writers of today. He set the bar,

William Shakespeare Part II: His Plays

William Shakespeare was part owner of the world renown Globe Theater in London and the blockbuster actor and playwright of England’s Elizabethan era. And his language was so beautiful, and he had such an adept command of the English language that he went down in history as a great and is known simply as The Bard today. He wrote about 37 plays in all that crisscrossed all the major genres and forms of play writing. Shakespeare wrote great tragedies such as Hamlet and tragic romantic plays such as Romeo and Juliet, and he pretty much covered the whole gamut of human behavior and motivation by writing about motives such as revenge, envy, and love, and he often portrayed the worst of human condition of insanity since such strong motivations can drive one insane. He also wrote such famous comedies as The Taming of the Shrew and a host of history plays such as Henry IV, a kind of a coming of age story for a party-animal English prince and his drunken sidekick, Falstaff whom he eventually rejects once he becomes a full blown king.

One writing technique that was rather unique to Shakespeare was the “play within the play” which was expertly employed by Shakespeare in the Taming of the Shrew in which the preamble of the play in which a slick nobleman tricks a drunken commoner that he is really royalty in disguise and stages a play for him about the taming of a woman with a wild temper. The major plot or “the play within the play” involves a man by the name of Petruchio and his quest to find a rich wife. And unfortunately for him his lady love, Katharina is an aggressive and ill-tempered woman in her own right so Petruchio employs the clever strategy of verbally abusing the officiating priest at his wedding and the hired help to subdue his new bride. The audiences of the day went wild over the humor in this play, however, the underlying motivation here was a bit more serious, greed. The man married Katharina strictly for her money!

There is some speculation about where Shakespeare got his inspiration from for his numerous plays, but in my own undergraduate studies I stumbled upon a short story written during the earlier middle ages in the Spanish language with a similar plot in which a man abuses animals to subdue his ill tempered bride. So perhaps it was the legendary tales of the era of Lords and Ladies that was the source of much of his seminal inspiration for Shakespeare, but he himself was such a rich and diverse writer that he should indeed be a seminal influence of all of us who write today, and I for one would take the class again today

Henry David Thoreau: Nature’s Friend

Henry David Thoreau was born July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts where he spent most of his life and was educated at Harvard University. But he was no lover of town life and the mundane, more trivial things pertaining to man. He was a very deeply spiritual person who had a deep love for and a connection to nature, and he subscribed to Transcendentalist thought. Transcendentalist thought is a philosophy in which he believed that spirit is greater than matter and intuitive thought more insightful than mere reasoning. In short, this man had the mind of a poet, and the story has it that he bristled so much at the status-qua that he insisted on wearing a green jacket to chapel as a young student when the rules of the school called for black.

But no discussion of Thoreau is complete without touching on Thoreau’s close friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the foremost writers and transcendentalists of the day. Emerson was a man who staunchly believed in the value of the individual over the group and the importance of the ability of man to live independently and free from having overmuch reliance on others. Thus Emerson became a close mentor to Thoreau and provided the parcel of land where Thoreau built his tiny cabin on Walden Pond to launch his own experiment in independent living by living off the land, connecting with nature, and to write his most famous book, Walden. So there on Walden pond, he lived alone for the span of two years,

Walden is a book about his adventure in the wilderness and is a vivid description of the natural world there throughout the four seasons and embodies the many-core Transcendentalist philosophies such as the importance of living a simple life, with few expenses, as the way to true independence and joy. He was a minimalist whose three most famous words “Simplify!” “Simplify!” “Simplify!” really resonate with my spirit today. Thoreau hated the technology that encroached upon nature especially the railroad and commercial farming, but always believed that nature would ultimately triumph as expressed in the following poem:

The moon now rises to her absolute rule

BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU

The moon now rises to her absolute rule, 

And the husbandman and hunter 

Acknowledge her for their mistress. 

Asters and golden reign in the fields 

And the life everlasting withers not. 

The fields are reaped and shorn of their pride 

But an inward verdure still crowns them; 

The thistle scatters its down on the pool 

And yellow leaves clothe the river— 

And nought disturbs the serious life of men. 

But behind the sheaves and under the sod 

There lurks a ripe fruit which the reapers have not gathered, 

The true harvest of the year—the boreal fruit 

Which it bears forever, 

With fondness annually watering and maturing it. 

But man never severs the stalk 

Which bears this palatable fruit.

He himself lived by hunting and foraging for fruits and vegetables in the wood and growing his own small patch of beans.

Thoreau was not commercially successful in his lifetime selling only 200 copies of his first self published book and his most famous book Walden only sold 2000 copies over the span of his lifetime, and it took 5 years.

As Thoreau grew older, he moved away from transcendentalism to become an anti-slavery political activist and wrote his most important essay, Civil Disobedience which was largely ignored until the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movements of the 1960s, He died on May 6, 1862, at age 44.

Walt Whitman: The Great American Bard

Walt Whitman was an innovative poet who went down in history as America’s most influential bard because of his unprecedented experimentation with free-verse poetry. He was born on May 31, 1819, to a farming family that was failing financially, so his father had to move the family of 9 children from his rural birthplace in West Hill, New York to Brooklyn where his father became a carpenter. Whitman attended public school there, but because his impoverished family still struggled, Whitman, unfortunately, had to drop out of school at age twelve and go to work in order to help them. He became a printer’s apprentice, however, he liked to read and continued to educate himself in New York’s public libraries.

He was eventually promoted from printer to journalist and then to the editor of one of New York’s major newspapers, but he was fired because of his antislavery views. During this self-education period of his life, Whitman began to experiment writing poetry in free-verse form using the very hypnotic cadences found in the Bible and was very much like Hebrew poetry found in the Old Testament. Much of it did not rhyme making it a revolutionary form on the current day’s literary landscape. So when the first edition of his book Leaves of Grass was anonymously self-published in 1855 it was mostly written off by the establishment as “garbage” except for Ralph Waldo Emerson who said the book was full of “wit and wisdom”. And Whitman wrote three more revised editions over his lifetime.

During the Civil War Whitman was one of America’s greatest patriots and was a staunch abolitionist so he wrote his poem Beat! Beat! Drums as a call for the people to rally and fight to keep America one nation. He did not want the people to rest and become complacent with their everyday lives.

“Beat! Beat! Drums! -blow bugles blow!

Over the traffic of cities- over the rumble of

wheels in the streets:

Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the

houses? No sleepers must sleep in those beds…”

So when Whitman got word that his own brother had been wounded in the war, he traveled to the South to find him and was so moved by seeing the carnage of the war that he moved to Washington DC to become a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals there and served to comfort both the wounded Confederate and Union soldiers suffering there. Whitman was a man of great compassion and love and he wrote my all-time favorite American poem O’ Captain My Captain as a heartfelt tribute to President Abraham Lincoln after his assassination.

O Captain! My Captain!

BY WALT WHITMAN

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

                         But O heart! heart! heart!

                            O the bleeding drops of red,

                               Where on the deck my Captain lies,

                                  Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,

For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

                         Here Captain! dear father!

                            This arm beneath your head!

                               It is some dream that on the deck,

                                 You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

                         Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

                            But I with mournful tread,

                               Walk the deck my Captain lies,

                                  Fallen cold and dead

After the war, Whitman became a civil servant for the US Department of the interior but was promptly fired by the director because some of the passages in Leaves of Grass were considered obscene by him and Whitman was accused of being a homosexual because some of the passages he wrote praised the beauty of the naked male body.

Whitman died in 1892 as the result of a stroke and was greatly honored for his both his patriotism and poetry in a public funeral.

Lord Byron: Ideally Romantic

George Gordon Byron the 6^th was as baron born in a family of men with a checkered past. His father was a chronic debtor who moved his family from place to place to avoid his creditors, and his uncle, from whom he inherited his title and a fortune, had a bad reputation as a murderer and a crook.

Born on January 22, 1788, Byron suffered from lameness since birth and was horribly abused physically as a child by his nanny, unbeknownst to his mother, and his schoolmasters. However, Byron was a good student who liked to read and became adept at writing poetry at an early age in grammar school and developed his craft over the years to become one of England’s most important poets of the Romantic era.

The poetry of the Romantic period was characterized by a love of nature, the supernatural fantasy, beauty and ideals that transcend the “real world.” Byron displays all these elements in his famous work, She Walks in Beauty

She walks in beauty like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,

Had half impaired the nameless grace

Which waves in every raven tress,

Or softly lightens o’er her face;

Where thoughts serenely express,

How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,

So soft, so calm yet eloquent,

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

But tell of days in goodness spent,

A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent.

This poem has many, if not all, the elements of Romantic poetry. The woman in this poem is otherworldly in her beauty, almost as if she is a supernatural perfect angel but is also compared to nature’s interplay of darkness and starlight during the night hours. Yet the poet not only loves her for her physical beauty, the physiognomy of her countenance of the “light and dark that meet in her aspect”, but he also loves the beauty of her mind and her spirit in which she lived her days “in goodness spent.” Thus we see the idealism in this poem as expressed in the holistic description of this perfect woman.

However, Byron like his father spent all of his wealth on wanton living and became a debtor himself while still in college. But he became disillusioned with the relative hedonism of his life in England and traveled to Greece where he embraced both Greek thought and ideals and there he wrote his first famous poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a biographical poem about his many lovers and exploits while traveling the Mediterranean countries to pursue more personal liberty and a more laid back life than he had experienced in Great Britain, for Byron had not only became Idealistic in his nature, but also gloomy because the ideals of the Romantic era were not congruent with the realities that he was experiencing in the world. Thus Byron was a bit of a paradox of a man with the two opposite contrasts in his nature. He was an idealist with a pessimistic view of life.

Near the end of his life Byron involved himself in Greece’s struggle to gain independence from the Turks by becoming a military commander but unfortunately died of a fever on April 19, 1824, probably as a result of his bloodletting treatment for his illness.

Japanese Haiku Master, Matsuo Basho: Simply Natural

Simplicity, contrasts, and opposites in nature are what constituted the three-line poems of Japan’s most important bard, Matsuo Basho. Basho was born in 1644 near the Japanese town of Ueno. His family was of Samurai decent, however, his father was a low ranking Samurai who essentially made his living as a landowning gentleman farmer. As a young man, Basho served as a page for a high ranking Samurai before moving to Tokyo where he became a poet and a teacher, but he then became so disillusioned with urban life that he left the city to travel into the more distant parts of Japan’s wilderness where he connected to nature and hone his skills as a “hokku” poet. There he raised the writing of hokku (or first verse) to a fine art.

Hokku was originally the first verse, consisting of only three lines, in a form of poetry called a renga in which one poet writes the first verse and is followed by another two-line verse written by a second poet. Today the hokku is known as a haiku and has only three lines of five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables which rarely rhyme with the subject matter usually being about a real scene taking place in nature that has a deeper spiritual meaning for the reader.

Haiku is characterized by a having a strict form of containing only three lines of 5,7, and 5 syllables (or little units of sound in the Japanese language called moras) and being objective in nature, rooted in the reality of the natural physical world, rather than in the subjective in which the reader brings his own meaning to the poem. But, it is, in fact, the deeper truths in nature that illuminates the reader’s intuitive mind. Haiku also gives the reader a clear picture of the contrasts in nature. Basho wrote:

An old silent pond,

a frog jumps into the pond.

Splash! Silence again

I as a reader can hear the contrasting silence of the pond almost as dramatically as I can feel the motion of the frog and the sound of the splash on the water and with the silence being contrasted with the sound, the silence itself is loud in this little snippet of time

Autumn moonlight-

A worm digs silently

into the chestnut.

Here you have the contrast the closing of a year and of repose of night with the work of .the worm laboring for his food. Nature never stops. Nature never goes to sleep,

In the twilight rain

these brilliant hued hibiscus-

A lovely sunset.

This gives the reader a vivid image in the mind’s eye of the contrast of the brilliant-hued flower with the somberness of rain and twilight.

Basho died in November of 1694 and is today revered in Japan as their greatest poet of all times with his verses inscribed today on many public monuments.

Edgar Allen Poe, born in January 1849, liked to weave tales of mystery and macabre. And he often delved into the inner workings of a sick man’s mind often using rich symbolism to signify his character’s insanity in works such as the Fall of the House of Usher in which a grand old house falls one wall, one brick at a time as the master of the house himself goes insane. He also wrote such gut-grabbing stories as Murders in the Rue Morgue, a real murder mystery, so Poe is credited as being both the father of the detective story and the short story. The Tell-Tale Heart is another detective story in which the perpetrator of a murder thinks in his mind that he hears the heart of his victim beating under the floorboards of his house where he is buried as Poe’s character is being questioned a homicide detective, so as a result of his guilt he confesses his crime to the police.
Poe was also quite a poet and wrote his masterpiece The Raven about the loss of one of his two ladies great lady loves, his dearly departed 14-year-old child bride, Virginia Clemm Poe. And although the poem gives the reader a ghostly feel with its incessant rapping and tapping of the raven on the window pane and the nightly shadows dancing in the room and the dying embers in the fireplace, the poem itself was inspired by an actual bird, the beloved pet that Charles Dickens kept in his barn and enjoyed. But on so many levels it’s mostly about the memories of the wife, who he had so tragically lost to tuberculosis, haunting him with the rapping, tapping in his mind. The Raven is a really long poem so for the purposes of this blog, I am only going to quote a few key verses here.

The Raven

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered,
weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of
forgotten lore-
While I nodded nearly napping, suddenly
there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, tapping at my chamber door-
“Tis some visitor,” I muttered, tapping at my
chamber door-
Only this and nothing more.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in bleak
December;
And each dying ember wrought its ghost
upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow-vainly I had
sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow-sorrow
for the lost Lenore-
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels
name Lenore-
Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken, sad uncertain rustling of each
purple curtain
Thrilled me-filled me with fantastic terrors
never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I
stood repeating
“Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my
chamber door-
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my
chamber door-
This it is and nothing more.

Poe was a man well acquainted with loss, death, and sorrow. Both his parents were dead by the time he was three years old, leaving himself and his two siblings destitute and orphaned. So he was taken in as a foster child by a pair of distant relatives and raised in Richmond Virginia. He was a good student throughout the lower grades, however, unfortunately, he failed in college due to a growing gambling addiction and misuse of alcohol. He then suffered a further loss when he was at the age of sixteen when his 15-year-old lover,, Sarah Elmira, married another man because her father vehemently disapproved of Poe and his status as a penniless orphan and with his gambling problems. But later on in life, the couple rekindled the romance flame after the deaths of their respective spouses. But a marriage between the pair was never to be because Poe himself died of mysterious causes at Church Home and Hospitals in Baltimore Maryland before the nuptials, with some saying he died of alcoholism and others theorizing that Poe himself was murdered and thus a character in a real life mystery.
Poe was such a man of shadows and sorrows and inspiration that some doctors today theorize that he may have been bipolar was quite a mad, inspired and genius poet indeed.