Poetry Month: April 23: Swimming w/ Shakespeare

This is a cheat, in that I wrote this last fall when I was doing docent training at the Folger Shakespeare Library. BUT, since it is, after all, Shakespeare's birthday, I am giving myself a pass, and letting myself use it to help catch up.

Swimming with Shakespeare

You can memorize the speeches;

you can study lines and language;

you can dissect all his characters,

find means and motivation;

imagine brawling London streets;

the history, myths, and legends 

of the printers and pretenders,

the rivals and the poets…

Seek the man in the minutia,

the real in the pretense.

But to truly know the playwright,

you must melt into the story,

and let the words, the incomparable words,

lap softly against your toes..

Then rising, rising, rising,

the tide of genius, rising,

sweeps you toward the river

of his past and future world,

bears you up on that singing swell,

gasping, breathless, all-but-drowning:

swimming with Shakespeare.