Poem: "A Brief History of Shakespeare"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This poem came out of the March 5, 2013 Poetry Fishbowl.  It was inspired by a prompt from chordatesrock regarding autism and echolalia.  Shakespeare kind of turned the idea upside down, preferring the grace of memorized lines to the garble of original composition.  The following poem is a look at how the world sees him, how he sees himself, and how he got

Comments

[technoshaman]

*smiles* thank *you*.

In the final choice a soldier's pack
is not so heavy as a prisoner's chains

What's this from? I know someone who needs to see that quote, if he doesn't know it already...

You're welcome!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm glad you liked this.

The quote is from Dwight D. Eisenhower. Sorry I forgot to include the footnotes! I've added them now.

Re: You're welcome!

[technoshaman]

Thank you!

[chordatesrock]

So Shakespeare chooses these ancient sources to seem smarter? Interesting.

I wonder how the people he left behind feel about the secession. Do they worry about him?

Surprisingly, I am slightly disappointed in this poem. I don't mean to say that it's terrible, but that I'm surprised not to like it as much as Shakespeare's other poems. Perhaps I had been expecting to see more of the way ableist attitudes affected his rearing, and how they may have infected his family and even Shakespeare himself. I had been hoping to see the ramifications of that, and, to some extent, I do...

How does the sort of patriot who fought for the chance to serve his country feel about seceding from it with the people who were his enemies? Does he think he was wrong before?

I'm afraid I failed to understand one of your references. What does "you make that signal with your eyes, lieutenant, not your pants" mean?

[adeliej]

I didn't take it so much as him wanting to seem smarter, but rather being dissatisfied with his ability to compose sentences that are... beautiful, for lack of a better word. Something like 'whole', maybe? And so instead of making do with what he can create himself, he uses what others have made beautiful before him - more of an internal need for 'beauty' (while I'm using that word) than wanting to appear a certain way. (This is mostly drawn off my interpretation of Verse 5.)

YMMV, though - what was your reasoning behind how you saw the poem?

[chordatesrock]

Yes, I took it that he chose to use echolalia at all because he wasn't particularly good at putting words together and was consistently disappointed by how they turned out. What I meant with that comment was that it seems that he chooses Shakespeare quotes and quotes from other classics, as opposed to quoting the "trash, news and gossip" that it is also canon that he reads, because the classics seem smarter. Note that it might be easier for him to use the vernacular and to get quotations closer to what he means if he expanded the pool he draws them from.

[adeliej]

Oh, that's a good point - I'd missed that nuance of it.

[thnidu]

I like Shakespeare. I seem to identify with him more than with the other secessionists, insofar as they come to mind at the moment. Maybe it's because I remember quotations-- though not nearly as much as he does, nor do I depend on them as he does. But I do use (and abuse) them.

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>I like Shakespeare. I seem to identify with him more than with the other secessionists, insofar as they come to mind at the moment.<<

This makes me happy. I think it means something that different readers are connecting with different characters. So maybe I'm doing an effective job of representing diverse character types and traits for reflection from different angles.

>> Maybe it's because I remember quotations-- though not nearly as much as he does, nor do I depend on them as he does. But I do use (and abuse) them.<<

I don't depend on quotes, but I do use them. I make my own and repeat them; I learn some from outside sources. I put them into poetry, obviously; not just here but also as titles and such. Quotes are timebinding tools.