I love these poems that have a conversational tone and just seem like someone telling you a story until they blow your mind with a metaphor: "as jellyfish, like thoughts, were passed secretly between people."
Also, 2: taking the irritating experience of being in a cheap motel where the sorrows or joys of people in adjoining rooms must be shared, and making that into a work of art is magic.
Yeah I do know that. What's infuriating about Shakespeare is that he seemed to have no ego: we know only a few paltry details about his life and try to impute the rest from his works. And the difficulty there is that Shakespeare could imagine and transcribe the feelings of men, women, kings, fools, tradesmen, Danes, Italians, Romans, aliens, you name it. So if we want to look at his work and say he was gay, or unhappy in his marriage, triumphant, a failure, a rich man—it's all in there. So we come away knowing nothing, except that he wrote this:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
I love these poems that have a conversational tone and just seem like someone telling you a story until they blow your mind with a metaphor: "as jellyfish, like thoughts, were passed secretly between people."
Also, 2: taking the irritating experience of being in a cheap motel where the sorrows or joys of people in adjoining rooms must be shared, and making that into a work of art is magic.
Yeah I do know that. What's infuriating about Shakespeare is that he seemed to have no ego: we know only a few paltry details about his life and try to impute the rest from his works. And the difficulty there is that Shakespeare could imagine and transcribe the feelings of men, women, kings, fools, tradesmen, Danes, Italians, Romans, aliens, you name it. So if we want to look at his work and say he was gay, or unhappy in his marriage, triumphant, a failure, a rich man—it's all in there. So we come away knowing nothing, except that he wrote this: