Even After All These Years
Even After All These Years
Notes about Michael Prior's poem "Swan Dive"
The poem, the titular selection of a chapbook published by Frog Hollow, features Ophelia, the potential wife of Hamlet. In the poem’s second couplet, the speaker dedicates the following lines to those of us who practise our Ophelia. The poem already prefaced with an epigraph from a conversation between her and Hamlet, where she delivers the line, I was the more deceived. It has been years since I read any Shakespeare, so I took my searches to Shakespeare Online and Wikipiedia
In Shakespeare Online’s entry for Ophelia, Ophelia is described as the epitome of goodness and exhibiting childlike and naive behaviors. The entry continues that she’s somewhat sheltered by Polonius and Laertes. The essay continues on that Ophelia is unable to cope with continuous traumatic events around her. I’m not buying it, but that’s just my willful ignorance.
Ophelia’s Wikipedia entry in fact does talk about conventions for the representation of female madness in English theatrical productions:
The early modern stage in England had an established set of emblematic conventions for the representation of female madness: dishevelled hair worn down, dressed in white, bedecked with wild flowers, Ophelia's state of mind would have been immediately 'readable' to her first audiences. "Colour was a major source of stage symbolism", Andrew Gurr explains, so the contrast between Hamlet's "nighted colour" (1.2.68) and "customary suits of solemn black" (1.2.78) and Ophelia's "virginal and vacant white" would have conveyed specific and gendered associations. Her action of offering wild flowers to the court suggests, Showalter argues, a symbolic deflowering, while even the manner of her 'doubtful death', by drowning, carries associations with the feminine (Laertes refers to his tears on hearing the news as "the woman").
The entry continues to reckon with the porrayal of Ophelia through the 18th century where portrayals of Ophelia took a far less intense and a more sentimentalised and decorous depiction. Later in the 19th century, theatre manager Tate Wilkinson exclaimed that Elizabeth Satchell was the best Ophelia he ever saw. Much of that mumbo-jumbo is gender structured conversation that revolves around bunk science where in fact Tate Wilkinson and many other managers ranked Ophelias based on whether the performer had any or many disappointments in love (that’s Wikipedia).
Going all the way back to Shakespeare’s time, there is no known evidence who would’ve played Ophelia back then. Actresses professionally could not take the stage in Elizabethan England. So it can roughly be assumed that Ophelia was played by a young boy. I guess digressions aside this is why I never read Shakespeare in the first place.
Kenneth Branagh rules though. Onto the discussion about Michael Prior’s poem:
Swan Dive I was the more deceived. - Ophelia, Hamlet, III.i It's hard to stay angry on a bed of water. Harder yet to remain above the tide -- hence the anchor, hence the dive. For those of us who practise our Ophelia, we creatures of conscience, let it be known that I have keened the lake in colder seasons, seen the loves returned by acts of ice. Olive bottles, agate necklaces bought in beachfront shops for cheap. I shall th' effect of this good lesson keep. I rearrange my lost and found. That man who was discovered rooting the bottom three decades after his death: in his boat, a fish still writhed the line. Hear me out. Even the swans' necks don't shape a heart when they hunt beneath the dark.
I love the lines creatures of conscience, let it be known / that I have keened the lake in colder. At some point the speaker intertwines themself with others who embody empathy and morality against perhaps a more duplicitous figure. Read Hamlet for more on that. I’m treading water in a lake; One hand holding my copy of Hamlet; the other a copy of the CanLit anthology Carl loaned to me. In another senseI’m still lost with my waterlogged copy. Simultaneouly treading water, reading the poem where the poem places me in its opening couplet, I’ve snuck back to 1994 to read Hamlet on my friend’s waterbed, but splitting that compound apart, I’m more likely stuck on the bottom of a lake. If I was more of a despondent character, than it could likely be both though. Using whatever prior knowledge you have of Ophelia, that anchor in the second stanza holds us in place in 1994 and the present moment with a copy of this Michael Prior poem and a copy of Hamlet. Disregarding the imaginative gymnastics there, it’s definitely possible.
Getting mired in time also occurs to me especially with the material objects that appear almost in a voltaic position. The olive bottles and agate necklace bought on a beachfront trip now frozen in time by the acts of ice; the deft use of ice that prefixes these material objects is wonderful. The objects now frozen in time. I enjoy that the only end-rhyme comes in the volta-like position: bought in beachfront shops for cheap. / I shall th’ effect of this good lesson keep. The rhyme hinges the poem and gives the poem’s structure a somewhat symmetrical shape.
The possessions anchor the speaker in place, much like the fisherman who thirty years dead on the lakebed still patiently waits for the illustrious fish. Waiting for something. Looking for love in all the wrong places because as the final couplet delivers its inversion, the reader is prompted to some sort of action. I’m just reminded of a broken Swarovski pendant.
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May you forever be on your way.
keened the lake.