As boy or young man I had seen (reading them
    carefully the day before) quite all Shakespeare's
    acting dramas, played wonderfully well. Even yet
    I cannot conceive anything finer than old Booth in
    Richard Third, or Lear (I don't know which was best),
    or Iago...or Tom Hamblin in MacBeth--or old Clarke,
    either as the ghost in Hamlet, or as Prospero in
    The Tempest, with Mrs. Austin as Ariel, and Peter
    Richings as Caliban.
                      ----Walt Whitman, Specimen Days


Thus greatness comes to kneel beside the springs
of other greatness, and to taste and drink,
cupping its hands there where the wetness clings
and watching how the cone of sand will sink
into the unseen source.  So Whitman knelt
beside the clear upwelling of those lines,
imbibing everything the playwright felt
as if it whispered to him through the pines.
Drank deeply, till it burned, it was so cold,
until its plummet was a part of him
(almost as deep as had the Bard of old).
So, hearing in the cedars dusk and dim
the hermit thrush he coupled with a star,
he made the lilac death's third avatar.



The St. Petersburg Ballet's Romeo and Juliet

    Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while
    Till we can clear these ambiguities
    And know their spring, their head, their true descent...
                   ----Prince of Verona, V, 3


The stage fog lifts on Queen Mab's world of dreams;
her visions overlay the loving pair;
in lightsome progress now they throw off gleams
and pirouette to get from here to there.
The tale proceeds at its own pace anon,
being part Shakespeare, part Prokofiev,
part argument and part a bawdy con;
the lovers clasp and then break off again,
spun with a force almost centripetal
across the floor, back to each other's arms,
apart again, until love's simple pull
is like a whirring top, and its alarms
too late are sounded, and two lives brought low
that late cavorted in the footlights' glow.



Borne Out

               He says he loves my daughter:
    I think so too; for never gazed the moon
    Upon the water as he'll stand and read
    As 'twere my daughter's eyes....
                       ----Shepherd, The Winter's Tale, IV, 4


The "he" is Florizel, and the "daughter"
the lost Perdita whom the shepherd's raised,
and if her eyes reflect her love like water
it adds but one more item to her praise.

The moon looks down; the moon sees both itself
and that pooled glass in which it's doubled there,
not like a mirror reached down from a shelf
but scintillant from the surrounding air.

Perdita plies her guests with flowers, to suit
the seasons to their kinds and characters,
and in them all her beauty's taken root
(except for her much hated "gillyvors").

This love shall be borne out, for at the last
it reconciles two houses to the past.