Veil of Poetry

It has been said that Shakespeare’s real sources for The Tempest are the three dozen plays of his which precede it. With surprising economy (barely more than 2,000 lines), The Tempest does in fact recapitulate the essential themes contained in the over 100,000 lines of verse he wrote during his playwriting career. The startlingly simple plot of The Tempest contains a tale of trial and constancy in love; a sketch of treachery and reconciliation in public affairs; a comic burlesque of both the romantic and tragic motifs, and an extended essay on the government of self and society. As though this were not enough, The Tempest is also Shakespeare’s only extended elucidation of the most mysterious of all his gifts: his miraculous control of the medium of poetry—or to borrow Seamus Heaney’s memorable phrase, “the government of the tongue.”

Shakespeare seems to have kept the plot spare and schematic precisely to leave greater scope for the play of poetry. Few of Shakespeare’s plays indulge so unstintingly in the play of “pure poetry,” reveling in means that are almost entirely sonic. Such verse is composed by abandoning the sensual appeal of a richly-figured, highly metaphoric and imagistic poetry, and substituting a music of pure thought and action, which, though it will be intrinsically less popular and seductive, will gain access to a place where pure intellection and action are fused. It is there that a concept like “forgiveness” has its origin.

The recurrent pageants and masques in The Tempest almost mock the processes of flamboyant show, which are absent from the verse. A musical analogy would be to the Bach partitas rather than the “visual” sounds of post-Beethoven symphonic music. We are bombarded with meaning rather than a profusion of images, invited into an ecstasy of syntactical concatenations cut loose from the usual concrete anchors of a poetry which accumulates objects and makes us see them. In The Tempest, we rather “see” with the inner eye of reason, of ratiocination, the verse leads us on to moral contemplation of actions nested in one’s inner being, where no clear or correlative “real life” images obtain.

Frank Kermode, in his introduction to the Arden edition of the play, tellingly quotes a passage from Rosemund Tuve’s study of Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery:

“The poet who imitates not the visible world but the intelligible as manifested in the visible will not consider that the use of artifice to emphasize form makes imagery less ‘true to nature.'”

Other poets since Shakespeare have attested in similar language to entering the free zone of so-called “pure poetry,” and their observations guide us equally well through the advanced metrical music of the “late” Shakespeare’s voice in The Tempest. One of our finest American poets, Robert Pinsky, has written in an essay on the responsibilities of the poet that “the poet needs to feel utterly free, yet answerable” and this describes well the Shakespearean epiphany of a Prospero who liberates Ariel only after he has performed important symbolic tasks. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney—honored just weeks ago with the 1995 Nobel Prize—might just as well have been talking of The Tempest when he wrote:

“Art is not an inferior reflection of some ordained heavenly system but a rehearsal of it in earthly terms; art does not trace the given map of a better reality but improvises an inspired sketch of it.”