Drunk in the dark, they toss the shiny loops

Here's another book I swung by while away from home: Headwaters, a  poetry collection by Rowan Williams from 2008. In my time with the book, I got particularly immersed in the sequence of ten sonnets about Shakespeare plays headed "Shakespeare in Love".

I'm struggling to choose which sonnet to quote when all are so absorbing. But the first and last are certainly indispensable.


1  Romeo and Juliet

Drunk in the dark, they toss the shiny loops
of silk back and forth, tottering around the pinnacles.
They trip and giggle over the tiles, they dare and shout
as the web crosses, spike to starry spike, and they
do not quite see, drunk in the dark, the little knots
twining around their feet. Tongues slur, eyes cloud,
limbs become heavy; the dream clings,
a wet cloth, over faces. So, when it gets light,
there is a web draping the Gothic spears,
damp, streaked with blood and silver, fading
as it warms. And the words caught in its circles
fall to the grass like fractured stone, like crumbs
from broken towers, tiles from the roof,
leaving the attics cold, the windows streaming.



--
--
--


10  King Lear

It does not keep you safe; it does not
give you the words you need, it does not
tell you how much to pay, how much
they owe you. It will not work, like egg-yolks,
to cool the numb heat of lost eyes and treacheries.
It does not surrender to the reasonable
case for not risking everything to keep
secrets and rivals, the white line in the tickling
membrane of freedom. It will not keep you dry: rain,
like crying, sinks down to the bone.
It will not stop: not when you want it to,
not when you want to settle with the mirror
of your shame. Never. It will not. Never.



These sonnets don't come from the perspective of critic or audience; as we read the poems we enter the plays themselves, not so much the plots of the plays as their different worlds. Love is the reality and the question in them all. It's not really about Shakespeare but about us.

Elsewhere there are two superb marriage poems ("A Midsummer Night's Dream" and, dreadfully, "Macbeth"). "Measure for Measure" engages brilliantly with the play's deep debate about venality, veniality and  forgiveness. The others, none of them less than provoking, are "Twelfth Night", "Much Ado About Nothing", "Antony and Cleopatra", "A Winter's Tale" and "Othello".

It helps to know the plays quite well. I thought I knew Romeo and Juliet, but I'm not aware of anything in it quite like the image of drunkenly stumbling round on a church roof with billows of silk. Though the dangerous high jinks of teenagers is of course germane. Perhaps it's a deep image, an apprehension of something hidden immanent in Romeo and Juliet, not only in the night scenes of party revellers, or of visits to the tomb of the Capulets, but in (after searching the Folger digital Shakespeare*) such phrases as "star-crossed lovers", "Begot of nothing but vain fantasy" (Queen Mab), "fleckled darkness like a drunkard reels", "thy canopy is dust and stones", "shake the yoke of inauspicious stars", Tybalt's "bloody sheet",  and probably a lot more.

Williams may have been inspired by T.S. Eliot's Coriolan and Marina. The form and the manner of proceeding often remind me of  R.S. Thomas's sonnets, and sometimes of Geoffrey Hill, but these poems are so achieved that influences don't really matter. They're intent, searching, and passionate.

*

Rowan Williams on poetry and frontiers (beginning with the South Bank) -- a talk from 2009:

http://aoc2013.brix.fatbeehive.com/articles.php/1752/rowan-williams-on-poetry

[On Shakespeare's Sonnet 23:] "But here Shakespeare is talking about one of those emotional frontier moments: stumbling, stammering in the context of human love that overwhelms, not knowing what to say. And in his Sonnets he explores again and again the way in which love and death interweave. Love is one of those things which, if you find the words and imagination for it, somehow carries you round or through or over a fear of death. Poetry is one of those things that you invoke to silence some of the terrors that human experience gives you..."

Almond (Prunus dulcis), Swindon, March 19th 2019.

[* In the new paperless era, I've started to use these Folger texts of Shakespeare's plays quite a lot, because of their attractive appearance and because they have line numbering. The texts do have some shortcomings, though. The line numbering must have been applied in an automated way, since e.g. lines of verse that are too long to fit on one line of print are numbered twice. I was surprised to see that it adopts the Q2/F1 reading "Then I deny you, stars!" -- Most editions have followed Pope's emendation, based on Q1, "Then I defy you, stars!" -- but maybe I'm out of touch with current scholarship.]