Black vesper's pageants

 It was only on the way out of The Globe in 2006 that I noticed the sign explaining that they were real asps that Frances Barber clutched to herself in the gripping final scenes of Antony & Cleopatra. Had I seen it on my way in I might not have stood so close to the stage. 'Real toads in imaginary gardens' might have been a fine way for Marianne Moore to theorize about the art of poetry, which is made of ink on a page, but that was a real snake, not a toy shop one, and on the few occasions I've been anywhere near one, I've tended to be wary.

She was powerful and at least as sexy as she needed to be that day, Ms. Barber, but I've never read it and an item in About Larkin 54 about the lectures of Monica Jones prompted me to have a closer look. I'm never sure if one should read or see Shakespeare first to get the best effect.

 

It's Romeo & Juliet all over again but on a grander, historic scale and with the two main characters more at fault than desperately unlucky. Politics and passion mix together about as productively as electricity and water but if the first two acts were mainly a matter of working out who was on who's side and why, that seemed to shift anyway, and the last two acts that I read on my way to and in Chichester cathedral today are powerful stuff. Quite where to put it, whether with the four big tragedies or the Roman plays is neither here nor there. It is its own thing and up there with the best of them. I've ticked it off and 'done' it now, of course, but I suspect there's much more in it than is dreamed of in my philosophy.

It might not be quite as full of quotes as Hamlet but it has some telling ones.

Louis MacNeice based his,

We are dying, Egypt, dying

in The Sunlight on the Garden on a line that even Shakespeare thought good enough to use twice.

And Thom Gunn's My Sad Captains comes from Act 3, Scene 13, line 189, one of the most perfect short poems of the C20th. Admiring that so much set me back years in the search for how I could write my own poems because I tried, valiantly but not always successfully, to imitate that seven-syllable line and usually those three six-line stanzas if not a rhyme scheme, too, and you need to be good to be able to carry all that off.

And so I wondered if there might be another ready-made phrase in Antony & Cleopatra with which I might join the party and, not long after I began wondering, there was, at Act 4, Scene 14, line 8,

black vesper’s pageants

 

It refers to the pictures one might think one sees in clouds, particularly when they can be more dramatic as evening comes. They are as soon gone again, and indeed,

That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.

 

There might be a poem in there even if Shakespeare did it far better more than 400 years ago. There wouldn't be much point in taking something from the first-rate to make something at best third-rate.

We will see about that.