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63. Cymbeline (2nd)

Seemed less strange this time 'round - Shakespeare's not so much making fun of the Fletcherian boy-actor tragicomedy (more like a melodrama, in modern terms) as pushing it to its limits. The thirty straight pages of revelations at the end, all of which we're already privy to except maybe some etymological business in Jupiter's prophecy, aren't so much parody as a way to maximize the appeal of that kind of ending. It's the happiest ending ever, at lest quantitatively, and we pretty much know it will be going in. I wonder how well that works in performance? This is a sturdy play, in its fashion, linguistically fresh and quite fun, but I'm not sure it does much more than turn up all the dials in someone else's dream machine. Shakespeare was never above slumming.

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What to call the kind of poem I mean? Set-pieces? Dioramas with mechanical elements? They aren't quite allegories, or anyway are a very special kind. Not quite scenes, but not quite tableaus. Quest portions? Decisions don't quite happen, battles definitely aren't won, usually aren't even reached. The knight on his horse coming upon something revising all expectation. But the something can be really something, a lot of somethings, a whole toy train landscape of related somethings. The poet tends to have each represent another poem, or the sort of surprise about life that could deserve being a poem. The more they can get in the more this vision approaches totality, the more some modeled or implied sequence of conclusions will get a reality, a life where these are the salient details right. Because of course there's usually a pretty free intermixture of observing and thinking about what's being observed - the reader's not left to do the whole unpacking. And it's not all packed in - the thought element allows ambiguity, perhaps, while the embodied, or I guess ensceneried aspects are the more rigid ones. They're the facts you won't escape or have to escape by interpreting, thus productive or unproductive of those mind-flights.

And these do tend to be set-pieces among the poet's other poems - tend to be longer, pentametric'ler. Obviously I mean Abrams' greater odes, redubbed 'crisis lyrics' by Bloom, though it takes some doing to find the crisis in "At the Fish-houses" or "Mont Blanc." I'm not entirely convinced you even need a crisis, but it's inevitable, given how densely the poet's collapsing other poems into this one, that these will be pieces they put particular stake in, that the answers given or refused here will be crucial ones. You might be able to write one when not at crisis, but you'll probably derive at least dramatic benefit from presenting things critically. All of you versus all of it, at its strongest, then take apart the versus, the it, the you as applicable - because again, no fight. And how could you anyway? Apocalypse can be gestured at, in poems like these, but it can't actually happen. Or if it does that's another poem, the Alastor genre, where the impossibility of ending gets addressed somehow, usually impossibly.

Real Americans get to use animals. New Yorkers, Bostonians and Brits are stuck with birds or inanimate nature, or worse, people - always a wild card, though Wordsworth was good with these. Animals were a technological advance for the genre, I think - but then I would.