The Lear Elegies

by Elaine Maria Upton

1. Up—early or late—on the staged edges of things— at the hovel and in the sold-out house the lights already out. The trafficked sky—piqued-pink a rose dying and violet half-hidden lightning blue silence at the last twilight, a fumbling thunder of his thoughts— all this he nakedly overtakes, severely testing the ages, sight, might of tongues. We are—a priori— to know: he sat encumbered on a throne, gave away a kingdom. We are entering the apparent ending whose burly banner is hope— whose goal is greatness—and all the scened and unseen shapes that court kings: daughters, princes, serving men, earls, dukes soldiers, charters, waning trade, wives, an assortment of wars, haunted hovels he would visit, speech that heats and inherits lust, milk uddered from the mind’s slippage, fright deeper than midnight—fools’ cacophony, discourse that renders ‘casualties’ of causes, counters birth, collects coffins, buries queens, checkmates the breaths of children.

2. The Earl of Gloucester—brutally blind—begged to be led to Dover. Wherefore to Dover? asked the masked Poor Tom. Any fool could answer: Dover rhymes with over and death. The sea’s wall makes a chalky ghost— mists ‘twixt Britain and France are where lover, madman, king-made-fool— and Macbeth making poetry with despotic dagger—meet. Where Nothing appears and seems the rule. Imagination disguised in blood or dressed in rags puts on the hollow crown. This is no kingdom but a stage of naked wretches the king—orating—owns.

3. What shall come of all this that passes for life? An antiquated or an august anguish? An unsuspected catharsis spiraling in and out past the storm? Pythagoras reclaiming numbers? Three weird siblings, barren bosoms, gone beastly: Goneril, Regan, Edmund. Three—Poor Tom o’ Bedlam, Kent, Cordelia. These are in exile, disguised or nothing at all— as though Nothing were inside a choice and truth a dowry a daughter or friend could give. Lear and his fool play the zero in-between the darkened threes of branches, or zero disguises Cordelia’s heart—the encompassing O—sign of her name, her name a globe where the devil’s nothing is everything, womb-bearing word, poetry of a palpitating— center penduling between progressing angels and the slow Earth. Past time, poetry moves— moistens the eyes of virtue, hoarsens the throat of the antagonist—who of us can cast a stone?— and the racked rogue’s on a roundabout to repentance—then or now.

Is it possible? A designer of Auschwitz sees his face in the cruel blueprint of things. There is no hiding place. After thirty-eight years of the discarded angel, he walks out of the wings. Who remembers? Is it possible? The frightened policeman in the U.S. city sits lonely with his guns. Turns the smart phone to off. Is it possible? The would-be bomber ponders at his mother’s grave in Paris at Per La Chaise.

Poetry ponders un-ponderously. Poetry undresses— unwords itself— unspools the life-lines—be-leaps the strings, arpeggiates the scales-- listens to itself in every self—dies into the silence—discovers possibility—creates what it wills.

Say—as though your way were dedicated and brave: I will be led unclothed to Dover. As though you were taught the thought and vision of a god—say: I have other meat to eat. Thy kingdom come. I would be led into the Mysteries of things. Thy will be done. Say: in poetry, the dovely magic of Jordan.

Beg your daughters not for soldiers, nor for bread, but gently inquire of a pillow for your death. At least one of them will meet your silenced howl, your foolish love. And the one—perhaps even another, lost—will grieve. Love is only what it only can be. What it must. Such is poetry.

4. Four hundred years later—or who knows how long his hour on the stage-time out of joint—who knows how long or how suddenly folded-short the calendar?—a friend asked Where is Christ in all this? In Lear they swear by Juno or Apollo, the god who never stays put on poets’ pages. Yet who but Christ enters Cordelia’s passion, Lear’s repentant suffering?

Christ is a name for all things countering strange transcending things. Imagination remakes—purely—who we would be— created of nothing. Even Macbeth struts and frets his nothing and in disordered fantasies proclaims he’s murdered death and then assumes he’s heard no more. Nothing is generative. Have pity on the king who prays Never, never, never . . . Such words on and on do but seed ever. Endurance? Why not? —beyond the final scene— Four hundred or forty –our experience in the wilderness confounds time again. Over and over . . . Daughter-fool-father-mother—confounded. King becomes Mother—heaven’s keeper and queen. So it must be. So it must be. This my heart’s necessity.

5. Four hundred years or thirty or three—depending on how and not what your heart would hear and see. Each may presume to be inscrutably alone—each in the seeming suffers. Yet even then in the act of presuming no one is there— some Madonna and Child, some Pieta appears and teaches: If there’s one there’s another—Imagined, whether greatly or little. Schionatulander still listens at Sigune’s heart. So it must be and the artist must sing. Isolde’s throat trembles in Tristan’s ears. Begging, she births his gentle smile. And Lear—even his unhoused mind must still dwell in possibility. He makes a hearth of enfolding arms. and whisperingly he asks— Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little.

You may author the unsung scene where she and he — this once-then-unclothed-king-turned-mother— sing as two birds in their gilded cage. You may see him prepare a table he— a wayward father has never yet prepared. He makes a sacred altar where the choler— his readied sulfur—combusts. And here he dares what he must. His heart—in hers—and ours in his—finds its abyss and breaks.

Study for The Death of Cordelia, detail of a sketch by George Romney (1734-1802); Folger Shakespeare Library

Elaine Maria Upton is a Shakespeare scholar and an award winning poet with extensive experience teaching in South Africa. She is an associate editor of being human and has contributed a book review, poems, and reflections.