Dionysian Secrets

—Poetry by Tom Goff, Carmichael, CA
—Public Domain Images of Dionysus

“SHAKESPEARE’S” CAMCORDER
(Eidetic memory, traced in “Shakespeare” by Dr. Eliot Slater)*
 
Edward de Vere lies restless in his bed.
He should be asleep, but no, sleep will not come.
A ghost appears, yet this ghost, no one dead,
With shimmering form lights air a shade of plum.
We’d call this much loved shape a hologram,
In mind’s eye, yet half tangible down the hall.
The boy by whom he sins and says I am
That I am, fount of scandal, his downfall,
 
This boy is almost palpably here, no chimera.
Of such day-waking night jars come Macbeth’s
Air dagger, Scotch kings’ processional. Camera
“Lens” predates Isherwood’s eye by many deaths.
How rare in adults, hallucinatory sight
Like this, our “Shakespeare’s” torment, secret might.
 

*In “Was Shakespeare an Eidetiker?” (1972)

LOONEY’S “SHAKESPEARE” TEST
 
On all the points then which we set before ourselves
in entering upon the search, we find that Edward
de Vere fulfills the conditions… if we have not actually
discovered the author of Shakespeare’s works we have
at any rate alighted upon a most exceptional set
of resemblances.
 
—J.T. Looney, in “Shakespeare” Identified, 1920

 
The test of Looney’s Shakespeare theory:
First, to see if his “Shakespeare” profile
(Decades before CSI is to be)
Will suit one man who’s hid till now by guile:
He has the man! A good close match. Now find
What manifold unpredicted pieces join
By logic of the search, how name and mind
And time corroborate; arch, portico, coign.
Without a bias preconceived for whom
To look, look you, De Vere fits with no fuss;
He slots right into pattern, steed, stall, groom:
This man knows—intimately—“Polonius!”
“Shakespeare’s” a courtier, wields a slim white staff.
There’s tomb for you! Self-assembling,
            round a new epitaph…

WHY DID HE HIDE? WHAT LOONEY
(AND FOLLOWERS) TELL US
                for James A. Warren
 
The man who sees deepest into the human mind
Must oft not speak of what he will there find:
Too true; yet we prosaics demand to know
Why such a man would bury layers below
The black ink of the pseudonym “Shakespeare”
His burden of thought, and lose all praise—for fear?
What fear? What reason to cloak, if not to smother,
His secret self, beneath the name of another?
Well, take for a start, the satire which may roast
Lord Burghley as Polonius; the ghost
Of sweet Anne task with Ophelia’s madness, with her
Provoking acquiescence to her father.
Nor let’s forget how something deeply shady,
God-kissing-carrion-natured in his lady,
Qualifies her perhaps as dark. But Dark
Must satin and saturate all his intimates,
Possess some souls entirely: it grates
As it entices. Such inconstancy
Shows in Anne Vavasour, the wantonly
Man-flying and man-alighting. He sees not
(Yet) men as the ink-dark fount of her every blot.
More dark: black-eyed, black-gowned, Penelope Rich,
Her gift, it seems, by turns to soothe and itch,
Triangulating love’s geometries,
From him to Fair Youth, with sprightliness and ease.
What of Emilia Bassano, musician, wit,
Alluring, brown-eyed feminist whose remit
May be to infuse his verse with women’s views,
Speak daggers to men whose ladies they abuse?
And how can we have forgot Elizabeth,
The source of chivalric life and courtly slow death,
Enchaining him to the lovely task of plays
For England, that to this day much amaze.
But sting in the living gift, a thousand pounds
Per year, insofar as he keeps no accounts;
An off-the-books freedom and conveniency
Which all the more enjoins his secrecy.
And love’s not all; his enmity with young Sidney
Converts at times to respect for his brawn, his kidney.
Now close to the nub of question: wounded pride
Born of compulsions, glories, he must hide:
Confessing to friends in many a honeyed Sonnet
His capers in motley and a fool-belled bonnet.
Last, and by far the worst, could it be men
Attract and arouse his love far deeper than
Women, than conscience can wake sense of sin,
Despite the Bible knowledge he’s versed in?
His breathless passion for his Fairest Youth
Inspires undying lines writ from and to Truth,
Yet bitter as it may be, he’ll urge the young man
To beget a masculine heir quick as he can;
And would that heir be passed for his, by-blow
And scandal-fuel for wits? Will we ever know?
To ask the question, why is his name hid,
Is to answer: lucky how loose the long-shut lid.
More to the point: when we indulge debate,
Might we recall what burdens a man of state?
Much more this full-fraught man, each rift with ore
And promises crammed, with covert wisdom stored?
Abandon hopes to pierce all camouflage,
Or to decrypt genius-level espionage?
His “I am that I am,” uttered in spleen,
Must also be read with his “I serve the Queen…”  

 

ON READING SHAKESPEAREAN FANTASIAS
(first published, 1930; reprinted, 2019)
 
Sweet-voiced, brisk Esther Singleton* once wrote
Book after book, scarcely a stop for breath,
A freelance lady, if ever such was, of note
For volumes on music, travel. Till her death,
A Shakespeare lover, most of his plays, light
Or tragic, pressed close to heart. The Tudor garden,
Her special love. Was this, the Bard’s birthright,
The withheld secret key to curious, ardent
Searches for Him? His expertise must lead
By winding, widening ways to Looney’s earl:
At last against resistance, truth may plead
And win, a dawning rooster-crow, sky-pearl
Purity. Now her Shakespeare garden may bloom
Truly. Rare threads commingle on her loom.

 
*Author or anthologist of some sixty books on music,

travel, formal gardens, and architecture, who published

The Shakespeare Garden in 1922. Singleton wrote her

Fantasias after a first grudging, then wholehearted,

conversion to the Oxfordian authorship theory. The new

printing isedited and introduced by James A. Warren.

HERALD OF THE MORN
 
In Esther Singleton’s Shakespearian
Fantasias, hear the crowing, comic Cock.
He thinks himself, of all De Verean
Characters, foremost. True: he’s Nature’s clock,
He is the avatar of abstract Time,
He is also the animals’ vicegerent
Who argues they’re co-equals in our climb
To breathing worth and blooded value. Errant,
Arrogant, oh how we believe the Lord
Anointed humans emperors of all.
This God we keep: cramped covenant, sealed Word
In us, void-spanning rebuke that scolds our Fall…
Enough! The Cock-crow ricochets to renew.
Soon, dawn-usurping day dries beads of dew.

DIONYSUS IN SAN RAFAEL
 
Now, with the earth for board,
The bread and the wine is poured…
                                    —CAS
 
Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Hill of Dionysus”:
Lines from the Necromancer’s late resurgence,
Named for a small mount of pleasure if not vices
In San Rafael. These picnickers, no virgins,
Filled with restored spring energies, are three:
Smith; poet Eric Barker; Madelynne Greene,
The dancer, stretch their lungs luxuriously,
Have labored with their legs to a serene
Where—likely star-point capping this triangle—
Madelynne, dress flung to grass, now leaping nude,
Feels air and light and motion gently wrangle
For sway in sculpting, contouring her. Rude
With health (remember sur l’herbe, the Dejeuner?),
Clark and Eric cavort about their priestess,
Till wine and food have drugged these men of Manet
Just shy of transmuting ecstasy to a tristesse.
All dizzy, ring-around-the-rosy prone,
Sandwiching voluptuousness and calm…
Between their camel’s-hair shoulders both men groan
Contentment, from their pavane, from the balsam
Of breeze, odd incantations in their heads.
Three in a heap, the suited, the nude, entwined.
And how is it with her, being the broken breads
Shared out between them, or the freshly vined,
Pressed and fermented drink to be imbibed,
Reconstituted loaf and liquor delicious,
To re-split, consume, her carnal form inscribed
On bacchanalian parchment, vestal, salacious?

___________________

Today’s LittleNip:
 
Hell is empty and the devils are all here.

—William Shakespeare

___________________

—Medusa, thanking Tom Goff for his smooth musings today! And just a note that the submissions deadline for Sac. Poetry Center’s Tule Review for 2020 is coming up August 15.  For info, see spcsacramentopoetrycenter.submittable.com/submit/.

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