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Each weekday in April, Poetry Daily brings its email newsletter readers a special poem, selected by a contemporary poet whose work has appeard on Poetry Daily, as part of its annual fund-raising campaign and in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year, Poetry Daily is presenting these poems and comments to its website readers.

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Lisa Russ Spaar's Poetry Month Pick, April 3, 2009

"Caliban," from The Tempest,   III, ii, 148-156 
by William Shakespeare  (1564-1616)

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

Lisa Russ Spaar Comments:
For me, Shakespeare’s poetic genius dwells in the plays. In profoundly rich, subjective, and psychically riveting monologues, asides, and exchanges – often delivered in the mouths of underdogs, villains, the marginalized, the Fool – we discover that “the lover, the lunatic, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” How forget Edgar’s mad speeches with Lear on the storm-concussed heath:

Poor Tom; that eats the swimming frog, the toad,
the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in
the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages,
eats cow-dung for sallets; swallows the old rat and
the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the
standing pool

or Iago who, at his most diabolical and ambiguous (“But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve / For daws to peck at. I am not what I am”), rivals Othello at the height of magnificent, blank verse eloquence: “It gives me wonder great as my content / To see you here before me. O my soul’s joy! / If after every tempest come such calms, / May the winds blow till they have wakened death!”? The Tempest, arguably Shakespeare’s most poetic and song-charged play, is full of music, and some of its most lyric speeches are given to the inhuman Caliban, a native “monster” of the island that Prospero & Co. attempt to orchestrate by magic. Caliban, no saint (at one point he readily acknowledges that, had he not been prevented from doing so, he’d have had his way with Prospero’s maiden daughter Miranda and “peopled else / This isle with Calibans”), admonishes his Master: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.” And curse he does, in a voice vital, inimitable, and sensuously particular: “All the infections that the sun sucks up / From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him / By inch-meal a disease!”) But he is equally capable of awe and rapture, as these lines from Act III attest. Caliban’s touching passage “Be not afeard/ the isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not” betrays a wonder beside which the abstract “brave new world” uttered by the inexperienced Miranda (whose name means “wonder”) pales. The oneiric, pre-Lapsarian cri de coeur of Caliban’s textured “poem” – its yearning for the lush bed of sound and oneness prior to wording – eight lines of rife, replete blank verse broken only to wake and “dream again” – is a harbinger of Prospero’s closing speech, which “want[s] / Spirits to enforce, art to enchant.” Just as Prospero, almost relieved, acknowledges that “Now my charms are all o’erthrown, / And what strength I have’s mine own,” so Caliban in this passage recognizes, as from the great distance of consciousness, the polyvocal voicings of his birthright – the keen and cry, the weeping and laughter that suffuse and inform all poetry.

About Lisa Russ Spaar:
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently Satin Cash. Her poems appear in many periodicals, including the Paris Review, Yale Review, and the Best American Poetry series. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

 

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