Polonius As Polonius

...Accumulating all those years The blue annuities of silence some called Wisdom, I heard sunstorms and exploding stars, The legions screaming in the German wood— Old violence petrifying where it stood...

...This second stanza ends with a confused reminiscence of Hamlet's ghost ("Rotting at ease, a ghostly doll"), as though the speaker were guiltily, hence furtively, trying to say that his father in the spirit is somehow buried in him, trying to speak but managing only to scratch uncommunicatively on the wall of the heart which is his tomb...

...another way regarded, the way of poetry, he wanted to become a poet, like Shakespeare, and instead became—himself...

...Yet I do mean to say what I can about the calculation which occasionally appears among the poem's many incoherencies...

...Children are very often given this instruction, the significantly revised modern analogue of "To thine own self be true...

...And I begin with an obvious move: This poem's subject is a certain kind of incoherency, the one that is latent—these days not so latent—in the idea of "character," or, as it is so often and so learnedly called, "identity...

...When they come to think about it, which may not be for 20 years, it perhaps seems somewhat problematic in the disharmony it blandly supposes between one's being and one's behavior, its odd relation, or maybe disrelation between being and seeming, or acting...

...This consideration introduces a further thought or two...

...And if the poem is hard for a learned and intelligent reader to resolve, approaching it freshly, it will be still harder for the poet himself to find a way through it between reading what it says and reminiscing about what he thinks he thought at the time of composition...

...but I have no memory whatsoever of thinking about that phrase...

...And when this silence returns intensified in the last stanza it is the silence not of wisdom but of insanity, related to images of stealth (Lear's stratagem, Polonius' hiding behind the arras) and the speaker's ridiculous, disgraceful death in the character of Polonius, attended by the same cruel applause as greets the ascent of poetry, its flight as Phoenix, self-born and owing nothing to this world, from the pit—from the unconscious, from the pit of hell itself, or maybe only from the pit of the Globe Theater...

...Of those thoughts, the poem is the sole remaining record...

...This is of course logically absurd, but it happens every day...

...And one more thing, fit to come last: the title...

...The blue annuities of silence some called/ Wisdom . . ." Silence, children are informed, or were, is golden...

...silence is the result...

...Both of them have spread visibly before us the magnificent manifold of their creation, and about one Divine Will and the Other we know equally nothing: "Where there's a Will,/ He's away...

...Apart from the literal and obvious significations having to do with the theater and the passage from life to death, there is another phrase much applied to growing up...

...That may have some relation to the idea of "states" which Blake, in Jerusalem, mercifully substitutes for the cruel idea of "character...

...Once long ago the thought came to me that you grew up, in life, at the moment that, in literature, you began to identify yourself with the villain rather than with the hero...

...for the origin of behavior, like the origin of almost everything else of interest to us, is hidden in the dark backward and abysm of time...

...Unseen" seems to fit rather pathetically into the poem...

...Perhaps it may be said that I have won a sort of Pyrrhic victory here...

...For example, it seems plain to me now that I must in some terms have designed to myself a mediation on that famous phrase "To thine own self be true," which when Polonius was a little boy he sometimes heard proposed by his elders as "the meaning" of those three dozen plays and their author...

...Ten heavenly don'ts Botch up a selfhood, but where there's a Will He's away...

...But there is a difference: The associations to this dream poem as I have so far teased them out, though they may be here and there a touch recondite, belong to the public domain and are not based on private memories inaccessible to the reader...

...I tried to be myself...

...But then, a very great modem novelist made nearly his entire oeuvre out of the insistence that representing is a higher and even a holier thing than merely being...

...A poem that needed defending would probably be by definition a lost cause anyhow...

...The unseen good old man— That sort of thing always brings the house down...

...Now, besides Polonius himself, who told his son about "trying to be yourself," there are several fathers who briefly and glancingly appear through the confused mutterings of the poem: There is God the Father with his "ten heavenly don'ts," which are of course the Ten Commandments...

...By contrast, the greatest creative forces, God the Father and Shakespeare the Father, are a paradoxical contrast of presence and absence, hidden behind their creations as the sun is hidden in his own fire: "Where there's a Will,/ He's away...

...Between the insane phantasy of Lear the actor, and the divinely self-begotten phantasy of Shakespeare the maker, our hero is caught: He cannot be either one...

...About this fatherhood a couple of other things may be remarked...

...Howard Nemerov IN the course of what is on the whole a very kindly letter about my recent verses, a friend observes: "You leave me behind at times—e.g., I've not the least idea of what's going on in "Polonius Passing Through a Stage"—and I will not put that down to obtuseness on my part, but to insufficient calculation on yours...

...there is King Lear, who in his madness proposes to shoe a troop of horses with felt in order to steal upon his sons-in-law and kill, kill, kill...

...Such afterthoughts have very nearly a necessity to falsify what happened...

...In some part your character must be received from the past, from tradition, custom, history, and so on...

...Some Hamlets, reciting this line, clutch madly at their noggins...

...Polonius Passing Through a Stage" is included in his latest book, The Next Room of the Dream, fust published by the University of Chicago...

...Now character must come from somewhere, must find a model to form itself upon, must somehow, to become what it is, become what it is not...

...there is Hamlet's father, who speaks sternly to his son about rotting at ease on Lethe wharf...

...Of course, in the silence he hears many things, it is as though both nature and history were a kind of echo of the silence inside his head...

...It is a thought about growing up...

...And it begins to appear that for all its confusions the poem is thinking obsessively, as a dream does beneath its condensations of image and displacements of feeling, a single thought...

...it sounds, too, deliberately thrown away...

...Well, you don't get it, at least the queer hero of this poem doesn't get it...

...But it may also mean that the whole house of the world, with its many mansions allotted to so many characters, might collapse utterly, morality, meaning and all, upon any serious inspection of its results, of the catastrophic disrelation obtaining between character and destiny, or chance, and between moral law and poetic phantasy...

...as though there had been, after all, a character of goodness in the speaker, but this had remained forever invisible and unrealized...

...in a famous figure, Jehovah is the father of mankind generally...

...The convenient name of that theater, introduced in stanza two, phantasies the drama of history as played out in the world and in the human head at once, just as in Hamlet's pun that says he will remember his father's spirit "while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe...

...but I wouldn't push it...

...Besides not defending the poem, there is another thing I cannot do, that is, explain it, or explain it away, with reference to the circumstances of its composition, the thoughts which passed through the author's head while writing, etc...

...finally, there is William Shakespeare, the father of Hamlet and so many others—exactly as...

...IF the reader is able to grant, first that the allusions in the poem are really there, and not merely introduced by me in the way of explanation, and, second, that despite the incoherence of the poem's surface they have a certain consistency of reference, we may speak further about what the poem is trying to say...

...Then from the fiery pit that self-born bird A rose...

...The third and last stanza is indeed made up of wild and whirling words...

...Finally, "That sort of thing always brings the house down...

...In the second stanza there appears the more sophisticated, or grown-up, opinion that nature and history are never received directly, but are always mediated by fictions, by drama, artifice, ritual and moral instruction (always negative in form: Thou shalt not...

...The line seems to come from outside the poem, or from another speaker...

...The first stanza, then, dreams about receiving one's self from nature or history...

...The company in my Globe Theater rants Its Famous Histories, the heroes fall In ketchup and couplets...

...Well, all poets writing in English have Shakespeare for their spiritual father...

...The villain, or else the fool...

...that is, they hope to grow up to be Shakespeare, and they never do...

...Even at the desperate moment, a doubt remains as to his identity, for Hamlet in stabbing through the arras cries out, "a rat!," while the Queen a few moments later calls Polonius "the unseen good old man...

...Admittedly, interpreting a poem of this sort is a little like interpreting a dream...

...A rat...

...It would in effect be scarcely extravagant to claim that all behavior is an imitation of behavior...

...Instead of realizing either the youthful dream of being Hamlet or the youthful dream of being Hamlet's creator, William Shakespeare, he dies as Polonius at the hands of one and the other...

...The other speaker, in this last line, may well be the poet himself, who is merely one of the selves of the speaker throughout: One way regarded, the way of action, he tried to become Hamlet and became an old fool...

...one proceeds laterally, by association, at first, rather than in the linear sequence of the "plot" (which nevertheless may exist...

...Colloquially, of course, it means that scenes like that, of desperate violence, always get great applause...

...It is transmitted through the parents, chiefly, and a boy may be thought to receive the idea of his character chiefly from the father...

...As though to say: I did as I was told, tried to be myself, I ought to have grown up to be Hamlet but turned out to be Polonius instead, and here I am dying of it...

...and whatever I write about this one will inevitably look like a defense...

...Or rather, doesn't introduce, for the further thought or two enters early in the poem, not in narrative sequence as in this account, but more counterpointed and inwoven with other materials...

...But if we agree in advance to strip off this poem's buttons and turn it disgraced out of the ranks of Poetry, we get in exchange the opportunity of a pretty adventure in the realm of composition—turning, as Valéry says the philosopher ought to do, a disaster into the appearance of a disaster...

...Given this, the figurative construction of the poem is still rather complicated, perhaps confused, reflecting whether legitimately or not certain confusions of thought attached to its subject...

...Howard Nemerov, Poetry Critic of The New Leader, is spending the current year as wriler-in-residence at Hollins College...

...We will allow, for courtesy's sake, that this poem is written by a poet...

...The silence grew Till I could hear the tiniest Mongol horde Scuffle the Gobi, a pony's felted shoe...

...Beginning in defeated resignation ("I tried to he myself"), it insanely confesses the insanity of any such project...

...Rotting at ease, a ghostly doll— What is that scratching at my heart's wall...

...Freeing the poem of my friend's charge that it shows insufficient calculation, I have brought matters round to the point where someone must surely say, Any contraption as calculated as that can't possibly be a poem...

...Being yourself, as against trying to be yourself: It is the difference between lighting a cigarette at home and lighting a cigarette on the stage...

...Perhaps the poem is expressing a disillusion identical with that of Prufrock—I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be—where he revises himself rapidly downward through the hierarchy of the play, viewing himself as possibly Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, maybe even Osric, but finishing up as Polonius...

...Put it this way, that character is a notion belonging equivocally to romance and morality, to history and religion...

...As you try on one character after another before hardening into the one you are condemned to, people will say, whether in rebuke or reassurance, "He's just passing through a stage...

...So keeping quiet for many years ought to be money in the bank, wisdom-wise...

...Moreover, the parallels between Shakespeare and Jehovah go further than the old metaphor, employed by both, which tells us that the world is a stage...

...But I mean, beyond this, or in counterpoint with it, that if you obey the instruction and try to be yourself, there ought to be some reinforcing response from the world, from the nature of things, that will help you be yourself, and confirm that being as belonging to the world and to the nature of things...

...but they tell him nothing about how to be, they become "Old violence petrifying where it stood...