PLAYING THE PART
Tonight, tomorrow, I must play Macbeth,
I know the lines, I know the man - his mind
is sealed on mine: musing, dreaming I find
his thought and motions natural as breath.
More than my own words, his are in my heart,
learned and rehearsed and etched along my nerves,
they redirect my harmless hand - it swerves
to seize the guilt I need to take his part.
Suspending judgement, I become the one
who kills a king, a friend, a family,
these massacres, performed with empathy
engrave me with the evil he has done.
The life I once called mine seems flimsy now,
extemporary, make-shift, improvised;
but butchery, ambition - memorised -
are goals that I no longer disallow.
This role is mine: the place where I once stood
is far behind: like him I wade in blood
with no return. I would not if I could
shrink from the lights to my obscure self-hood.
I wait at Dunsinane for Birnam wood.
DR. JOHNSON
He's lumbered with huge flesh and heavy bones,
bent nearly double, twitching, gulping food.
In other men a flame-like mind disowns
the body's weight and its inquietude.
His reason cannot tell him how to live,
how his light soul could fly above disease:
this monstrous carapace will never give
the spirit time to separate with ease.
He knows the two are different but his frame
is so convulsed with crippling, black-dog fears
that in half-madness they become the same.
The wolf gnaws until selfhood disappears.
And, as his mother dies, he sits and writes:
he'll pay her passage with his darkest nights.
(Johnson's mother made him read "The Whole Duty of Man" every Sunday. 'On hearing she was dying, he did not speed to her bedside but plunged into writing "Rasselas", exculpating himself by earmarking the proceeds for her funeral.' Roy Porter "Flesh in the Age of Reason."
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(
Tonight, tomorrow, I must play Macbeth,
I know the lines, I know the man - his mind
is sealed on mine: musing, dreaming I find
his thought and motions natural as breath.
More than my own words, his are in my heart,
learned and rehearsed and etched along my nerves,
they redirect my harmless hand - it swerves
to seize the guilt I need to take his part.
Suspending judgement, I become the one
who kills a king, a friend, a family,
these massacres, performed with empathy
engrave me with the evil he has done.
The life I once called mine seems flimsy now,
extemporary, make-shift, improvised;
but butchery, ambition - memorised -
are goals that I no longer disallow.
This role is mine: the place where I once stood
is far behind: like him I wade in blood
with no return. I would not if I could
shrink from the lights to my obscure self-hood.
I wait at Dunsinane for Birnam wood.
DR. JOHNSON
He's lumbered with huge flesh and heavy bones,
bent nearly double, twitching, gulping food.
In other men a flame-like mind disowns
the body's weight and its inquietude.
His reason cannot tell him how to live,
how his light soul could fly above disease:
this monstrous carapace will never give
the spirit time to separate with ease.
He knows the two are different but his frame
is so convulsed with crippling, black-dog fears
that in half-madness they become the same.
The wolf gnaws until selfhood disappears.
And, as his mother dies, he sits and writes:
he'll pay her passage with his darkest nights.
(Johnson's mother made him read "The Whole Duty of Man" every Sunday. 'On hearing she was dying, he did not speed to her bedside but plunged into writing "Rasselas", exculpating himself by earmarking the proceeds for her funeral.' Roy Porter "Flesh in the Age of Reason."
To return to the Home Page click here
(