Saturday, November 15, 2008

More Shakespearean Haiku

Jones, Keith. "Ophelia Complains to the Author."
It wouldn't be fair to have a Hamlet haiku without an Ophelia Haiku. After all, if you can't have Hamlet without Hamlet, you also can't have either Hamlet or Hamlet without Ophelia.

In this poem, she's complaining because, when Hamlet goes mad, he still gets all the best lines. And when it comes to his big exit if you know what I mean), he's got it all sewn up. 

"But what do I get?" she thinks. "A bunch of pansies, a few scraps of folks songs that nobody's heard of since the New Christy's Minstrel Singers went defunct, and an exit line that even T. S. Eliot couldn't use in a free verse poem, let alone blank verse!" 

But, because this is a haiku, she only uses seventeen syllables to express all that frustration.
Ophelia Complains to the Author

"The rest is silence."
That's his last line. And for me?
"Goodnight, sweet ladies."

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Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest