While preparing for my upcoming lecture on Romeo and Juliet (next Wednesday at 11 am at the Atwater library), a realization came to me regarding Shakespeare's use of poetry. It occurred to me that no other form of writing could contain all the complexity of life - its changes and ambiguities, the fact that we have to search and think to find meanings in events, our psychological upheavals and lack of inner consistency, the way that words and objects can have meanings far beyond themselves - all of these are best expressed, and perhaps only expressed, through poetry. Shakespeare, the "Chief Poet", as Keats called him, allows us to see the workings and potentials of our minds through the unwavering quality of his poetic writing. And even his prose is poetic, as you know from this justly famous passage: "What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!" Shakespeare shows us not only what we are but also what we may be.

John Keats once said something along the lines of Shakespeare being his favourite poet, because he wrote about how life is, and not how he wishes it were. This brings to mind a similar thought - Claude Monet saying, "I have no other desire than to live and work in accordance with the laws of nature." What I'm trying to get at here is that serious artists are people who explore life and its forces with honesty. And in literature, Keats is right, there is no one who does so better than Shakespeare. So, in honour of this astute observation, I'll use a John Keats poem, the sonnet entitled "Bright Star", to provide an illustration of the importance of paying attention to the punctuation when reading poetry.

When reading verse, we often have a tendency to pause or even stop where we shouldn't, because the lines are broken off in unusual places - like the middles of sentences for example. But just as with prose, it is the punctuation that should determine the breaks. This poem - which has as its argument that the narrator would like to be as unchanging as a star (an echo to Julius Caesar, perhaps) not so he could watch the oceans wash the world or snow falling, but rather to stay perpetually awake and suspended in meditation on the beauty of his love - is one sentence in length. Try reading it (aloud, of course) with that in mind:

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art —

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors —

No — yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever — or else swoon to death.

Tomorrow: an example of the same principle from Shakespeare. (By the way, it was the Monet quote above, along with his paintings of course, that inspired my piano suite called, Impression: Sunrise, which is linked on your right.)