On Shakespeare's 460th Birthday...

...A Reflection on His Enduring Poetic Genius

by Julia Buckley

This month we appreciate those poetic voices that gave words staying power, words that burrowed inside us and found our hearts and souls. But rhyme and rhythm, those two companions that helped to give the words their gloss, remain a crucial part of poetry, and William Shakespeare must be acknowledged today as a poet, a genius of iambic pentameter who gave us the Elizabethan (or Shakespearean) sonnet and a multitude of poetic phrasings to live by.

The simple format of the Bard’s sonnet style was ABAB  CDCD EFEF  GG. Thus, you had alternating rhyming lines, grouped in quatrains, until the final two lines (thirteen and fourteen) when you created a rhyming couplet, and this became the “mic drop” of your whole poem.

Among the many ways one can celebrate poetry and Shakespeare this month is to write a sonnet, or many sonnets, and read them aloud, revelling in the rhythm, rhyme, and intelligent wording of the poem.

For example, if I were to be asked to write a sonnet about National Poetry Month, I might begin—

What poems bring to ev’ry human heart
Cannot be measured with a mortal tool
But must be calibrated as an art

That elevates the thinking of a fool.

For those interested in sonnets, there’s a lovely video on this Shakespearean site, along with links to all of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

You can explore his beautiful sonnets and poems in the sites above, but I want to mention one more aspect of his poetic gift: the way he brought his poetry into his drama. Many of Shakespeare’s plays were written in iambic pentameter (or partially so), but that lovely regular line rhythm isn’t always apparent because he wrote in Blank Verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). His diction, though, is unmistakably poetic, and I’ll support this contention with some of my favorite examples.

First, which love sonnet is superior to the words spoken by Romeo when he realizes that what he felt for Rosaline was infatuation, but what he feels for Juliet is love. As with the sonnets, Shakespeare seeks a sublime image to demonstrate the transformative power of Romeo’s love. What better than the metaphor of light? When Romeo lays eyes upon his young love, he concludes:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,
As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand,
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!

For I ne’er saw true beauty til this night.

--Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 5

It amazes me each time I read it that Shakespeare had so much insight into every aspect of the human condition, including the overwhelming sensations of love. Romeo felt such love and such awe at her beauty that light itself could not compare to her. Shakespeare lifted the notion of love to the sublime, the eternal, and thus made it profound.

Emily Dickinson once explained the essence of poetry in a letter, saying,

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?”                         ( L342a, 1870)

I like to use Dickinson’s method of determining what is poetic because it is the words that elicit a physical reaction that have already made it into our consciousness. Her “top of the head” feeling comes to me often when I read William Shakespeare, or the Romantic poets, or Emily Dickinson!  So all of my excerpts here are lines that moved me to a state of awe.

The poetry in Shakespeare’s plays gives them their staying power (401 years since his death), and there are so many other beautiful poetic moments:

Prospero the magician, in The Tempest, after giving up his power, and determining in an existential speech that “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”

Or Macbeth, forced to sacrifice his selfish dream, his kingdom, and probably his life, concluding, “I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun.”

Or his wife, Lady Macbeth, plagued by horrible dreams and heavy guilt, murmuring “Hell is murky . . . “

Or Old King Lear, lamenting, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless child.”

Such powerful, poetic language cannot help but live on. Note the use of metaphor, simile, allusion, alliteration, personification, and other poetic devices in the quotes above that elevate the words to poetic status even without the use of rhyme.

Entire books have been written about Shakespeare’s poetic genius, and I have only made a clumsy foray into his talent. I hope, though, that these examples will send you to his works to reclaim your own favorites by this great poet who remains a gift to literature and mankind.

 

Julia Buckley is a Chicago-area writer. 

She taught high school English at an all-girls school for more than thirty years, and she considered the teaching of Shakespeare’s works an honor and a true joy. 

She has published several mystery series, including the bestselling Writer’s Apprentice series. 

She lives in the suburbs with her husband, within driving distance of her two sons.
 

 

Sonnet 18

 by William Shakespeare

read by Jan Macklam

Jan Macklam is a retired secondary school teacher, born in High Prairie, Alberta, Canada (where she sang in the junior choir with Marlyn and her sister!). 

A University of Alberta alumna, she lives in Edmonton, Alberta. Married to Mark. Two grown children, Laura and Paul. 

Happy birthday, Mr. Shakespeare!

Funny Friday

Welcome guest blogger Janice MacDonald!

Photo credit: Arif Kassam

How did Randy Craig come to be?

I had gone back to university to do an MA in English, with a focus on detective fiction and popular culture.

I remember quite clearly sitting in the grad lounge, reading some lovely trashy paperback novel like The Maltese Falcon or The Night The Gods Smiled, when some person up to their armpits in Chaucer and Derrida said, “So now I suppose you’re going to write a mystery novel, are you?” and I responded, “Yes, I suppose I am.” I had been out of school for a while, and had already written a couple of local history books and some radio plays at that time, but I don’t think till that moment happened, I had seriously considered writing a mystery series.

But, there I was -- committed. And they do say to write what you know. So the idea of a grad student coming back to do an MA, after having been out in the freelance world a while seemed a natural row to hoe. Randy’s return to academe had been because she had found a brand new writer to study and base her thesis on, but what about people who wanted to create an academic life around Shakespeare or Samuel Beckett? 

At just about that time, I had friends in Genetics who had been told their research was only going to net them M.Sc. degrees rather than Ph.D.s, because it was negative findings, and no journal would publish their work. Scientists all know that negative findings can be just as valuable as positive ones, but there is an element of a rat race in everything, right? So, the whole idea of looking at what people would do to make it in academe came about, and with that came the start of a series.

It had to be set in Edmonton. Nothing was set in Edmonton, and I figured we needed to correct that. I’d also done an interview of L.R. Wright who said she had really had to fight to get her series set in Sechelt, B.C. I just thought it was about time we owned up to existing. Detective fiction requires location to be a main feature of the work, too. Character and location is really what draws people back to a series time and again. It’s been a wonderful thing to become an ambassador for my city to the world, and readers here in Edmonton still find it fun to see their own streets becoming a bit “mean.”

Her name, Randy, is short for Miranda, of course, one of Shakespeare’s true naïfs, who has to learn who to trust and who not to trust in her “brave new world.” But another reason for the androgynous nickname was to fit into the tradition that was building in female detective fiction, which I had just been writing about in my thesis. With that either/or name or those initials, the reader can believe the character to be somewhat of a tomboy, and therefore probably better able to hold her own in a physical altercation. She also has the potential of getting the drop on someone once in a while, if they think they are coming to meet a man.

The trouble is, between the publication of my first and second book, I met and married a lovely man named Randy, which gets people who are just meeting us all confused for a bit. I am surrounded by Randys now. 

And I wouldn’t have it any other way!



Janice MacDonald lives in Edmonton.  She writes for the government during the week and mystery novels on weekends.

The Roar of the Crowd is part of The Deadly Medley Sweepstakes at Criminal Element!  For your chance to win — and to learn more about the latest and greatest in crime fiction — just click here before February 17.