by Nils Peterson

At my senior center we have a Shakespeare class led by marvelous young woman, actor, playwright, professional clown. Her main method is to assign us parts and have us read the text out loud. I taught Shakespeare for a bunch of years and did some of this. But this class makes me wish I had done more of having students read out loud. I kept most of the good lines for myself. Selfish. Speaking well-ordered words is one of the great physical pleasures. Yes, physical pleasure. The body responds to good words in the right order (when you say them out loud with appropriate energy) in the way it does to a sip of good wine at evening,

We’ve been doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I got the part of Bottom. Here’s what I got a chance to read and rediscover in the reading:

Bottom: When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer. My next is “Most fair Pyramus.” Heigh-ho! Peter Quince? Flute the bellows-mender? Snout the tinker? Starveling? God’s my life, stol’n hence, and left me asleep?

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom. And I will sing it in the latter end of a play before the duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

I had thought to call this piece “The Poetry of Of Incoherence,” but when I thought about it, that title is exactly wrong. Bottom is the most coherent of poets. What is the poet’s job but to find language to explain and share his experience. At this, Bottom is wonderfully successful. His experience is – to be loved by the queen of fairies while wearing an ass’s head. I know enough about wearing an ass’s head in romance to have the publisher of my first book of poems insist that the name of it be The Comedy of Desire.

And is it not a strange masculine desire to be loved by some avatar of the queen of the fairies (for isn’t at first one’s love object in a way an incarnation the queen of the fairies, Titania?) even while inhabiting the body of a stumbling, foolish male, in other words wearing an ass’s head. I don’t think I’m speaking for myself alone. At least I hope so. Again, here is Bottom’s wonderful attempt to describe his experience, “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was.” This mix up is such fine poetry, the coherence of incoherence. No. I’m doing it again. It is coherent. It describes exactly what it feels like to be fearfully and foolishly awe-fully love. Awe is the word. Words for awe are hard to come by. This marvelous mixing of the senses comes as close as we are likely to get.

So, I insist that “Bottom’s Dream” is right up there with the great speeches “To Be or not to be,” “Our revels now are ended,” “Oh reason not the need.”

I’m also aware that in a world of manosphere and the dating applications that say if you’re not in bed after the third date, it’s time to move on (or at least that’s what “influencers” are saying, some of them). Maybe what is missing in today’s romantic world is the feeling of awe. I think of Tony’s song in West Side Story “Maria,”

Maria! I’ve just kissed a girl named Maria, And suddenly I’ve found How wonderful a sound Can be.

Maria! Say it loud and there’s music playing— Say it soft and it’s almost like praying— Maria . . . I’ll never stop saying Maria!

And he sings her name again and again and again. Our hero has found language appropriate for his feeling of awe at falling in love. He makes one word, one name, say it all, awe and all else. At least if you’re an antique romantic like me.

Of course, the ancestor of West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet. Here’s Romeo trying to do the same:

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Pretty good. You try it. Imagine you’re Romeo and say those words. Become Romeo in the saying. Where do you pause, which word do you emphasize? What is the state of mind that demands those words? If you felt something while trying this out, go to the internet. Get the whole speech. Become Romeo. Your body will tell you, “This is fun. Let’s do it some more.”

P.S. Since the subject of my age came up on the way to here and there seems to be a little room for more, let me add:

A Memorable Fancy – an Attic

Thinking this morning of my age, the thought that I had climbed into the loft of my life, I paused, pleased with the sound of the L words but thought more, no – No loft but an attic, an attic with boxes, cartons, photograph albums, old toys, the lost leg of the horse that pulled my toy milk wagon, the rest of the horse attached to the wagon with frail old leather strips, the wagon, the red car I could pedal to make it go forward which cousin Kenneth envied when it somehow got to Sweden in 1938, in a far corner, a mysterious steamer trunk thought lost in the 1958 flood of the Greater Miami River – thinking to stay, poke around a bit, but up pops rascally Whitman chanting, “Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,/The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together,” and thought, whoa, this attic’s a bigger than I thought, thought – this has turned into a hell of a job.