You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Ophelia’ tag.
I haven’t taken any classes in writing poetry, so I’ve been experimenting on my own with different voices and styles, just to see what happens. While experimenting, I wrote this poem about Ophelia’s drowning in the voices of the servants who may have found her. I was also reading Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons at the time, so I intended to make the voice 19th century southern American.
Ophelia Found
We found Miss Ophelia
drowned in the river
sunup this morning
checking fish traps we was
drowned by her choices she was
Happens with no mother to see to a young’un.
Yes.
Stones clutched in her hands
stones lading her bodice
that fine thin gown a-hers
binding up her legs
pale like a baby bird they was
tried to fly too soon
Better she should’ve put a stone enwomb.
Yes.
Pulled her out from the water
laid her down soft on the bank
sent the boy to tell ma’am
whilst I made her clean as I could
carried her up to the house
Cleaned up as much as you could I’m sure.
Yes.
We piled her stones in a little cairn
aside the river
stones she chose herself
to mark the place
moved the traps upstream
Did you tell ma’am about the stones?
No.
©Copyright 2009 Pat Edwards
Working on my poem about stones and choices, my mind went tripping down the road of Ophelia and her drowning. I had to pull out the dumbbell-size Riverside compilation and re-read that part of Hamlet. In school I took a seminar that read the folios, but that’s been more than (cough!) twenty five years ago. Re-reading the Shakespeare made me think I might write this poem in iambic pentameter, but I got past that foolish thought quickly.
Millais' well-known Ophelia
When the queen tells Laertes about Ophelia’s death she blames it on a combination of Ophelia’s girlish foolishness picking flowers and climbing trees when a malicious tree branch wouldn’t hold her, so she fell into the river. This was certainly a way to ensure she was buried in hallowed ground, as suicide was a sin. In the next scene, the clowns as gravediggers talk about how the rich get away with shading and spinning the truth, and the poor can’t. Of course, what’s not talked about and scholars have targeted, is whether it was murder and was Ophelia pregnant. Shakespeare gives hints with Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia, the queen’s elaborate story, etc.
What’s missing, too, is a scene with the servant(s) who found her, pulled her body out of the river, and carried her back to the castle. I plan to build the poem on these characters and the off-stage action in the great tradition of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. I should be so skilled!
Poetiosity 