In this final act of the play, we see the death of almost every major character. Go figure. In the very beginning I was taken aback by the double standard that has been held, throughout the play, against Hamlet. Ophelia was given a proper Christian burial although she committed suicide, which is against the law of the church. This was no doubt a doing of the king, burying her like this, giving even the maidens of his friends more preferential treatment than his own son. Later, when Hamlet comes by the burial, we see his infamous interaction with the skull and he discourse with the digger. I want to intervene, to scream at Hamlet and tell him he is witnessing the digging of his love’s grave, before he learns it by the royal family. I also want to tell the clown that he is speaking to Hamlet so that he might speak more kindly to him. On page 158, we witness Hamlet confessing his true love for Ophelia. Despite his words of madness, he has always loved her, making her death even more “tragic”. After the scuffle at the funeral, Laertes and Hamlet are to participate in a real duel, with many riches banking on the winner. After this, the plot is an unimaginable landslide of swift deaths. The queen accidentally sips the poison (and her “doting” husband only makes an aside that she will die) and as she slumps, Hamlet and Laertes simultaneously wound one another and as they both die, Hamlet makes one last stab at the treacherous king and they all die in a matter of only two pages. Unbelievable. Next, we learn that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have also been killed. Elsinore is a slaughterhouse for noblty. Hamlet, with his dying breath, asks that Horatio tell his story to the world. Horatio must go on to tell the truth of the royal family and their “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts; of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause; and, in this upshot, purposes mistook fall’n on the inventors head.” Pg 177 lines 387-390 

“How does Hamlet? Mad as the sea and wind when both contend, Which is the better.” Pg 115 line 7

Gertrude is admitting to her son’s madness and shows concern for the worsening of his condition. This was the initial caving of his mother to the admittance of his madness, which I thought was interesting.

“His liberty is full of threats to all—“ page 115 line14

The king is making excuses for eliminating Hamlet. He accuses him of being a danger to everyone, when in reality Hamlet has only thus far slain a man that threatened his own safety. I know that Hamlet must be rather distraught with the task before him, but I do believe his madness is partially acting and the royal family is falling for the bluff.

“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm… Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.” Page 120 lines 27-32

This quote is Hamlet’s subtle and clever was of taking a stab at Claudius’ power. It is not the throne Hamlet wants, but his father’s revenge and Claudius is his target and as much fear as Hamlet can instill him is to his advantage.

“Quoth she, “Before you tumbled me, You promised me to wed.” He answers: “So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun, An thou hadst not come to my bed.” page 128 lines 63-67

With this song that Ophelia sings in her final madness, we see a glimmer of the pain she has withstood because of her father and brother. They told her to abstain from any response to Hamlet and she was forbidden to “come to [his] bed” and he therefore will on longer marry her. This is Ophelia’s underhanded and maybe even unrealized rebellion against the oppressive men in her life. 

In Act III the text begins to flush out the themes of Madness, Acting (pretending or lying), and family relationships. The main concern of the royal court, minus hamlet, is hamlet’s sanity. They repeatedly refer to his “ecstasy” and his wavering sanity. I think it was foolish of them to believe that Hamlet was legitimately so disturbed by his love for Ophelia that he had gone mad. Love doesn’t make someone as melancholy as hamlet. If anything, he would have swaggered, love-struck about the castle if he had been in love with her. This act also concentrates on the acting in the play and the trap they are trying to catch Claudius with. Everyone in the cast is lying to someone in their family in this story. I think it is unbelievable that a mother can be so detached from her son and her deceased husband. It also astonishes me how the men around Ophelia, even her father see her merely as a piece of meat, tempting young men left and right. She is an object to be had, not a person with feelings. If I were Ophelia, I would have long ago put my father and brother in their place, and forced them to allow me to love whomever I chose and to love. Again, if I could step into the play as Claudius, I would (in my deceitful ways) begin plotting against the life of young hamlet, having seen the obvious parallels between my sin and the play put on by hamlet. There are some places where any real-life reasoning person would have uncovered the tricks in this play. Did Claudius honestly think that the play was merely a coincidence? If I could have again, intervened in the play, I would have been hamlet in the great hall when he met with Ophelia while Claudius and Polonius listened in. hamlet did (as his letter made very clear) at one point, love Ophelia, and he was way too harsh on her. The way he dismissed her and recommended she go to a nunnery before making monsters of more men was too harsh for him. Its not as if Ophelia probably even sensed she was being wronged, but hamlet had once been one of the monsters who competed for the love of Ophelia, and he was a hypocrite for giving her so much crap for her beauty, as if she was some evil temptress. Ophelia hardly has any individual motives at all, and could never be an evil anything, unless being a puppet for her father or her brother. 

The first thing I noticed about Act II was the various English phrases we have taken from Hamlet. On face 44, I noticed when Polonius said “Master, sir, here’s my drift”. Never would have guessed that that’s where “catch my drift” was derived from. Then again on page 67, the First Player quotes “But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword”, which we hardly think twice about, but must have been fairly newfangled to the Elizabethan audience. We speak of presidents taking the election on one fell swoop, without a second thought to its origin in hamlet. That’s pretty cool. I was also struck by the very human personality that showed in this Act of the play. As I read, I gain more and more appreciation for Shakespeare’s skill with literature. The enormous challenged posed by creating life-like interaction for an audience, in scripted form was elegantly surmounted by Shakespeare. You can see the underlying motives of even the most seemingly pure characters and the very human reaction and multi-faceted feelings they harbor. For example, when Polonius says he wants to protect hamlet from his own insanity, but he is willing to impede Hamlet’s love for Ophelia. I also thought this act was rich in clever ideas. Shakespeare must have thought hard in order to contrive the various situations in which the character tries to fool the other ones. When his two friends try to distract hamlet with a recital by the players, Hamlet turns even that on its head in order to guilt-trip Claudius into admitting (or showing) his proof of the murder of the King. If at any point in the Act I could have stepped in, it would have been to chase Claudius when he left the play so upset. If only Hamlet could have confronted him in his emotional weakness, I think his revenge perhaps might have been complete, bloodlessly. Hamlet just seemed to be satisfied with his strong reaction, and seems like he will just wait longer to take revenge. 

In Act I of “Hamlet”, we are introduced to the discord and conflict that fuels the play. With Shakespeare’s form of literature as a play, we are only allowed the physical and behavioral look into the characters, leaving many questions. Thus far, we can gather that Ophelia is a meek woman, letting the men around her womanize her at every opportunity. We also meet the power hungry Claudius, the deceitful Polonius and the disloyal Gertrude.  In the court, hamlet seems to be the only character that functions with individual motives. I was also struck by several confusing moments. First, I was curious as to whether Gertrude was disloyal before the king’s death, or if she was just very shallow and moved on quickly. As angry as Hamlet is at his mother, you cannot help but feel that maybe the swift marriage was her twisted way of healing after her husband’s death. I also felt threatened by hamlet telling the guards of the specter. In a time of such trickery and secrecy, disclosing such secrets to others seems dangerous, even if they swear to keep quiet. When Polonius tells Ophelia to avoid all Hamlets’ affections, I was curious is she would follow through with her father’s wish or if she would court him secretly, I feel like she might just obey, being the pushover that she is. My last question was that of Claudius and if he found it so easy to kill his own brother, I can’t help but sense that young Hamlet is in danger as well, especially since he poses a threat to Claudius with his promise of revenge. I want to see whether hamlet will take swift and violent action to revenge his father or if he will be more indecisive in his revenge.

P.S. I love hamlet so far. 

ordinary penny

little pressedpennies

from

                     far away

ordinary ordinary and dirty

in agoodway

sweetlittlewords

pressed into an ordinary

penny in your wallet

make it extra

            Ordinary

help to(perhaps you

already

kn

ow)remind you of

the little hands(hon

              estly)giving

you the Pressed penny

Like, Cummings, I explored on ordinary object, made beautiful by it’s significance to the human soul. I reenforced again and again the “ordinary-ness” of the penny, made special by the pressed words in it, like the kind they make at zoos, where they turn Abe into a beluga whale from the in the Detroit Zoo. You may not know, but these penny pressers actually press the very penny that you put in, and its not some hoax. I promise, I’ve had it proven to me. It was on a certain special dirty penny and the White House is half-printed on it. So there you have it. I broke the phrases with small qualifications, or reminders, much like Cummings did. His words, like mine sound like a thought, as if the person is actually relaying, in a scatter-brained way, the story of these little copper reminders of someone that you love. The words may not be on the same line, but you can understand the thought, for some odd reason, as Cummings would have done. The format, helps you to visualize the poem in very approachable ways, such as the way “far away” is far away from the other words. the words “sweetlittlewords” flow together, in the way they flow across the penny. The penny is like “Harold Loves Maude” and its something ordinary you make extraordinary. And you can throw it in a lake so you always know where it is, or you can keep in in your wallet, along with all the other pennies, as a constant reminder of that special someone. 

I have to admit, when I learned we were blogging as opposed to writing a research paper, I was thrilled. Its not that I thought it would be easier than a paper, I just was excited not to be burdened with the library visits and the printing and copying and pasting and remembering and stressing involved in the paper. Blogging was a lot more intuitive to young people, I think. It was a good way to let us learn to network and learn with a new and exciting format. The blog was hard to understand at first, but in the end, it was easy to use, and the assignments were comprohensive and achieveable. I think it was a god idea to put a word limit and a time due date for the posts, because it helped give structure to something that I would have otherwise been very open-ended and fairly confusing. I liked this project because it gave us an opportunity to research in our own community as well as the community of geniuses. I liked being able to freely analyze and agree or disagree with my poet and with other poets. I also think that the approach of blogging was particularly fitting for studying cummings for some reason. His contemporary style and his new approach was almost an echo for the format of our project. This project made poetry approachable and enjoyable, and with the insistance of comments, we were forced to read and learn, on our own time, about other poets and what others thought of them, broadening the scope. I felt involved in other people’s projects, unlike the research paper, and it was more fun for me to see the way my classmates approached their given poet. Thanks a lot for not giving us a paper J

Here are links to my comments:

On Jessica’s blog

On Jonathan’s blog

On The Godless Monkey’s blog (here my name is cummingsfan#1)

On Shrimplate’s blog (in which i am just plain “caroline”)

Cummings was, in fact, more directly associated with the major masters and he “hung out with” the likes of Pound and Eliot, not merely being influenced by their work in anthologies, but in personal letters and in direct speech. There is, in fact, a complete collection of Pound and Cumming’s correspondence called “Pound/Cummings” interestingly enough. They discussed drafts of their own work and discussed the craft of other poets of that time, such as Eliot. Pound was attending Harvard at a time when many of the masters were associated with, or were attending Harvard themselves, placing him in a thriving community of poets, writers, and artists of the early 19^th century. He wasn’t a fast friend with every poet of the time and his contemporary and rule-breaking ways led him to be wildly popular as well as detested by one group or another. And although Cummings may have written with a nonchalant, even humorous style at times, his poetry sought the truth in life and the simplicity of love and death. Very philosophical. Not surprising since he was, in his childhood surrounded by such “family friends as the philosophers William James (1842–1910) and Josiah Royce (1855–1916)” (source). Cummings himself was an influence on notable, younger poets such as “the New York poet Billy Collins [who said] … “I don’t think of Cummings as an influence in the sense of a stylistic model, but I do remember his poetry opening my eyes to something new when I first read him in the 1950′s during my teenage beatnik period.”(source). He also seemed to influence Charles Bukowski in his own way, Charles said that, “In Cummings I liked the way he placed his words… There was a joy, and a rareness in the way he placed the word.” (source)

Cummings shared biographical, political and stylistic ideas with several of the major masters, including Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Like these masters, Cummings attended Harvard and, like Pound, didn’t receive a degree right away. Cummings did, as a matter of fact, share a very friendly relationship with Pound and they “carried on a long and varied correspondence from the 1920s until Cummings’s death in 1962.” (1) Both poets wrote to the other, sending drafts of their poetry, as well as political commentary of the time, including their shared extreme views of American foreign policy. They discussed Mussolini’s Italy and other World War II subjects, which both men were accused and imprisoned for these “slanderous remarks”. Pound and Cummings “also discussed the works of mutual friends such as T. S. Elliot” (2) and were members of similar places in American society. At Harvard, Cummings first heard Frost and Lowell and was influenced by the artist, imagist movements of Pound, Williams and Doolitte.

Cummings said that he was particularly affected by Pound’s poem, The Return, which lacked meter and took liberties with word spacing. This encouraged him to experiment with spacing and typography, something which was facilitated by a typewriter. An avoidance of capital letters and creative placement of punctuation soon became his trademarks. His experimental poetry took many forms, some amusing, some satirical, some beautiful, some profound, and some which did not make much sense. Even his supportive friend, Williams Carlos Williams, thought [some of his poems] almost unintelligible. (2)

Williams himself even said of Cummings, “With cummings, every syllable has a conscience and a specific impact.” (4) Cummings poems seemed to undulate and importance the speaker placed on certain phrases, words, or syllables, which Pound also favored in his poetry. Like in the “-In Just”, Cummings places his words in a way that lets the speaker voice their own undulation of words. You can see in this excerpt:

it’s

spring

and

    the

            goat-footed

balloonMan       whistles

far

and

wee

Along with the obvious similarities of diction and experimentation with word placement and combination, Cummings shared small stylistic preferences, such as the use of exclamation points, which Williams favored by the nature of his Puerto Rican background (5). Pound and Williams experimented with diction and images of their poems, and as Mrs. Hazle always says, they set the precedent for the potential poetic beauty of a simple object, like water splashing into a white porcelain sink. Cummings was inspired by these broken rules, yet he experimented not only with imagery and vocabulary, but typographical rules as well. Few of his poems and completely left-margined, and you can almost “see” the way the poem is meant to be read, much as Williams shaped his poetry to look like small wheelbarrows or a red fire truck. “Cummings said that he was particularly affected by Pound’s poem, The Return, which lacked meter and took liberties with word spacing” (2) and has stanzas that look like this:

See, they return; ah, see the tentative

     Movements, and the slow feet,

     The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

     Wavering!

With this inspiration, Cummings created his trademark style with his lack of capitalization and his whimsical punctuation.  

Buffalo Bill ‘s by e.e. cummings

Buffalo Bill ‘s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus

he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

Buffalo Bill\’s

This poem is a subtle, but powerfully ironic statement on the part of the speaker. The speaker is a living man who has outlived the great Buffalo Bill. He is speaking towards the general public, and in the end, he even addresses Death himself. The man is seeking present his new superiority to Buffalo Bill, seeing as he himself is alive and Bill is now dead. He admires Buffalo Bill but he also belittles him. “He disparages Buffalo Bill merely to exceed him in worth or stature” by merely existing, unlike the deceased celebrity. His disparaging tone can be collected from the way in which he refers to him as “‘defunct’ not ‘dead’ impl[ying] callous or humorous indifference to or even approval of Buffalo Bill’s death”. In the end of the poem he also refers to him as Death’s “blueeyed boy”, making him not only seem younger, but inferior to Mister Death and to the speaker himself. The poem itself seems to swoop out towards the right of the page, as the speaker seems to get carried away with his admiration, but he anchors himself again at the left margin, assuring the audience that Mister Death has a hold of the blueeyed boy. This admiration mixed with disdain is curious and ironic, because the speaker himself has done nothing special to speak of except to survive, and he seems to take that as ground for superiority. In the poem Cummings also links several words together to create a visual or audible sense of continuousness, such as “onetwothreefourfive”, making the shots seem rapid and concise. When he combines “watersmooth-silver”, you can hear and see the silky coat of the stallion. These connections bring us to create one thought from several words and that thought passes swiftly and concisely. The diction in the poem is admiring, but sarcastic. He mocks him by calling him a boy who has been taken by the adult “Mister Death”. Cummings creates imagery with the visual of the horse and the blue of the eyes, creating power and innocence, respectively. The story is a narrative of the death of a celebrity and it uses the personification of death and metaphor in its description of the horse’s hair. Symbols throughout the poem include the clay of the pigeons, which could represent mortality, the innocence of the blueeyes and the stallion as an impressive beast that has been tamed. When the speaker says “Jesus”, we understand that there is irreverence for religion and the question of an afterlife is nonexistent, making the line between life and death very plain and simple. This poem is one man’s attempt to elevate himself over a celebrity and a fellow man, who has been conquered by death. It is obvious that the living and the dead are not comparable, and therefore the speaker’s self-elevation is illogical and almost desperate. “The poem contains the theme of the passing of worldly glory, but its principal meaning is that pride is blind and goeth before a fall.” This means that one man’s “superiority” over a dead man is false and will be short-lived, for he himself has forgotten his own mortality, and will shortly befall the same fate as Buffalo Bill. He however, will be inferior again, to the great hunter and Indian fighter, as he is lost to history.

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