Shakespeare Made Me Do It...All Over Again

Jeff—Saturday

I think I’m losing it folks.  By that I mean I came up with this terrific idea for a poetic parody as this week’s post, one that would be challenging to write. Just what I needed to clear my head for the new novel I’m about to start.

I labored away at it, but as I did something familiar about it all had me wondering whether the Bard of Avon was playing with my mind for daring to tinker with his work. Then again, Macbeth and his dagger—the one he uses with the prompting of his lovely wife to off the king--is captured in a famous soliloquy…starting with, “Is this a dagger which I see before me,” so why would what I wrote not seem familiar?

 

But as I wrote, the siren song of déjà vu kept calling out to me.  That’s when I went back into my files and found I’d already plunged that dagger, in a blog I’d written and posted two-and-a-half years ago.

Argh.

So, what to do?   Start afresh with perhaps a poem by one of the Dylans, or just forget all about it? 

I compromised. I’m republishing. After all, Shakespeare is read more than once, so why not Siger?   I can’t wait for the answers to that rhetorical question.

Still, no matter the inevitable slings and arrows, here’s my walk down memory lane with Mac the knife (Macbeth, Act 2, Scene1).

In this case, all Wells doesn't end quite that way.

Is this a blank page which I see before me,

The blog thought toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To writing as to sight? Or art thou but

A blogpost of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the late-night pressèd brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I write.

Thou deceived me the way that I was going,

With such inspiration I was to use.

Mine blog is made the fool o' th' other ones done,

Or else worth all the rest. I see thee still,

And on thy screen and laptop gouts of blood,

Which was not so before. There’s no blog here.

It is the bloody press to write which informs

Thus to mine eyes. Now o'er the one half-world

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates

Pale god Poe’s offerings, and withered murder,

Alarmed by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,

With deadline’s ravishing strides, towards some design

Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Hear not my words, which way they speak, for fear

my very stories prate of my runamuck,

And take the present offer from the time,

Which now sits on me. Whiles I write, MIE lives.

Words to the heat of reads too bold breath gives.

—Jeff