Quills: Shakespeare
Title: Hamlet, Found
Author: Keppiehed
Word Count: 286
Prompt: A line by Shakespeare
A/N: Written for Quills. I chose to write a poem in the form of found poetry, from the play Hamlet. For those who don't know, some info about the style from poets.org: Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems. A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.
To love, or not to love-that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler with emotion to struggle
With the slings and arrows of Cupid's bow
Or take arms against a sea of desperate feeling
And by isolation end it all. To love, to fall-
No more.
And to fall comes the darkness of painful oblivion
The heartache and thousands of natural tears
That grief is heir to, so isolation is devoutly wish'd for.
To love, to fall-
For in the fall comes the sweet harmony where life's nectar spills,
When we have shuffled priorities, and it
Must give us pause to know we're wrong. But there's the respect
For mortal rejection the follows us a life so long.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of hurt,
The reverberating waves of punishment, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, or any other pain
The insolence of indifference and the spurns
That come from one so much better
When he himself is fine alone,
With bear bodkin plunged through his bleeding heart?
Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under unnecessary emotion?
But the dread of complete solitude after maturity
Is an undiscovered destiny hard to bear,
For which no traveler returns,
As final as death
And makes the rest of us bear the sharp talons of uncertainty
Than plunge into love and experience what we know not of?
Thus love makes cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of man
Is sicklied o'er with a pale cast of doubt
And turns away in nigh a moment.
With cowardice their feelings go awry
And lose the name of action
-And love is not experienced, just remembered
Like smoke in the wind.
Author: Keppiehed
Word Count: 286
Prompt: A line by Shakespeare
A/N: Written for Quills. I chose to write a poem in the form of found poetry, from the play Hamlet. For those who don't know, some info about the style from poets.org: Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems. A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.
To love, or not to love-that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler with emotion to struggle
With the slings and arrows of Cupid's bow
Or take arms against a sea of desperate feeling
And by isolation end it all. To love, to fall-
No more.
And to fall comes the darkness of painful oblivion
The heartache and thousands of natural tears
That grief is heir to, so isolation is devoutly wish'd for.
To love, to fall-
For in the fall comes the sweet harmony where life's nectar spills,
When we have shuffled priorities, and it
Must give us pause to know we're wrong. But there's the respect
For mortal rejection the follows us a life so long.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of hurt,
The reverberating waves of punishment, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, or any other pain
The insolence of indifference and the spurns
That come from one so much better
When he himself is fine alone,
With bear bodkin plunged through his bleeding heart?
Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under unnecessary emotion?
But the dread of complete solitude after maturity
Is an undiscovered destiny hard to bear,
For which no traveler returns,
As final as death
And makes the rest of us bear the sharp talons of uncertainty
Than plunge into love and experience what we know not of?
Thus love makes cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of man
Is sicklied o'er with a pale cast of doubt
And turns away in nigh a moment.
With cowardice their feelings go awry
And lose the name of action
-And love is not experienced, just remembered
Like smoke in the wind.