When Bottom awakens alone in the woods after his liaison with the Fairy Queen, initially his words and senses seem confused:
The eye of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4.1.220-4
man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,
man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to
conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream
was.
In reality, however, this synesthesia may also be read as a prophetic trait, as the indicator of an understanding that transcends mortal human senses. Having glimpsed another reality, having been intimate with a magical and immortal world, it is not Bottom’s senses that fail him, but his language. Because his experience can neither be confined within the limitations of a few mortal senses, nor sufficiently encompassed by the range of human linguistic expression, Bottom lacks the ability to describe the vastness of his encounter in simple words.
Yet, prophetic vision isn’t always confined to the marvelous or the mystical. It may also include curses, as in Shakespeare’s Richard III, when the Duchess of York pronounces the imprecation in the title on her son. The curse presages Richard’s downfall but its dire tone also suggests a potential desolation at his end. Because Richard III, like Macbeth, is a ruler who ‘makes his own bed’, so to speak, his increasingly tyrannical behaviour in advancing his own rise to power leaves him without any meaningful support as his reign draws to a close. Not only the mortal world abandons him, but the spirit world does so as well. By the time the ghosts of Richard’s previous victims denounce him in a dream before the Battle of Bosworth Field, he realises that he has isolated himself so thoroughly that he has become trapped on the island of his own infamy. Awakening, Richard notes “I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,/ And if I die no soul will pity me” (Richard III 5.3.212-3).
Naturally, prognostication was an old idea even in Shakespeare’s day. Any number of his plays feature instances of dreams, forecasts, omens, portents, and spirits that variously impart some vision of the future to the mortal world. Of course, accurate as these predictions may be in the theatre, such ideas fall into the realm of superstition, which common knowledge dictates isn’t to be trusted. After all, even a prophecy that comes true might ultimately lead on to disaster. As Banquo tells Macbeth, who has been newly made Thane of Cawdor as the witches had predicted:
. . . oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
Macbeth 1.3.135-8
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s
In deepest consequence.
Apparently caution is always the order of the day. Here’s Stevie Ray Vaughn’s cover of Stevie Wonder’s hit song on the subject of superstition (which particular video, I admit, I include for sentimental reasons, which some of you who watch it carefully may recognise):
The Bible contains a specific injunction against fortune telling:
10 There shall not be found among you [any one] that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, [or] that useth divination, [or] an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch,
The Bible (KJV) Deuteronomy 18:10-18:13
11 Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.
12 For all that do these things [are] an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.
13 Thou shalt be perfect with the LORD thy God.
Yet, in spite of the scriptural directive against it, fortune telling remains ever popular. People want to know what the future might have in store for them. Leave alone all the suggestions from the world of psychological evaluation that prophecies so given may become self fulfilling, people always seem to want to know what the future holds, albeit they seldom want anything in the form of a curse.
In Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the magician Merlin constructed a ‘glass’ that was capable of revealing things to those who looked upon it.
The great magitien Merlin had deviz’d,
The Faerie Queene III.ii.xviii.159-62**
By his deepe science and hell-dreaded might,
A looking glasse, right wondrously aguiz’d
Whose vertues through the wyde worlde soone were solemniz’d.
The glass is capable of not only showing the entire world and all that’s in it, but it also reveals Britomart’s future love to her. The glass not only shows what is, and even what has been, but also what will (or perhaps what is most likely to) be.
In cases like in the Duchess of York’s pronouncement above, words also retain a creative or destructive potential, giving the author, or the speaker, the ability to shape the future world. This suggests an important notion about perception and even understanding–the perception of what literary thinking specialist, Philip Davis, describes as the opening that Shakespeare and other writers leave between things–between tones, ideas, or juxtaposed thoughts or words–to enable and promote a kind of creative leap between them.*** Such spaces offer an interpretive gap that call for a creative fulfillment, which is supplied by the reader, performer, or interpreter of the work.
These gaps may be simple juxtapositions of ideas that seem to be initially disparate. On his entrance, Macbeth speaks to his friend, Banquo, saying, “So fair and foul a day I have not seen.” (Macbeth 1.3.39) Initially, a critic might say that it is fair and foul for any number of reasons: fair because Macbeth and Banquo have won the day in battle and escaped with their lives, and foul because soldiers have been lost in the fighting, because there was a rebellion against King Duncan at all, and because the weather is foggy and suspect. However, the fair and foul also prefigures the coming pronouncement of the witches, that Macbeth will be Thane of Cawdor, and later king, and that Banquo will be father to a line of kings, albeit he will not be king himself. The possibility of coming honours seems auspicious, except that the witches do not reveal that Macbeth will murder his king to take the throne, in an infamous instance of fair ends achieved by foul means. The day is fair and foul for both Banquo and Macbeth because it simultaneously presages both their successes and their losses.
Yet, these gaps may be much more subtle. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy king, Oberon, and his lieutenant, Puck, roam the woods both causing and attempting to right troubles resulting from romantic attraction. The juice of a magical flower has been dropped on the eyes of a number of sleeping characters, resulting in their doting on the next thing they see. Still, even more interesting than the comic love story, is the difference between servant and master. Oberon’s language is replete with beautiful conjurations of the natural world:
OBERON
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.256-67
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.
And there the snake throws her enameled skin,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in.
And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes
And make her full of hateful fantasies.
Take thou some of it, and seek through this grove.
When we contrast this with Puck’s language, we find that although the goblin’s words may also be beautiful, his focus differs greatly:
ROBIN
AMND 3.2.399-409
My fairy lord, this must be done with haste,
For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger,
At whose approach, ghosts wand’ring here and
there
Troop home to churchyards. Damnèd spirits all,
That in crossways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone.
For fear lest day should look their shames upon,
They willfully themselves exile from light
And must for aye consort with black-browed night.
Not every passage is this way, of course, but throughout the play, while Oberon’s perspective retains a quality that is richly evocative of the growing world, Puck seems to envision a world of threatening beasts, graves, corpses, and wandering ghosts.
Although it remains only indirectly expressed, the midpoint between Oberon’s evocations of life force and Puck’s haunted cemeteries seems to be the mortal world–personified by the Indian boy, the child over whose custody Oberon and Titania quarrel. The child may represent not just humanity, suspended unseen somewhere between nature and the grave, but also humanity’s future, an unknown quantity, looking forward to a more distant maturity.
There are many examples of this in Shakespeare, which suggests a kind of literary pointilisme, a written aspect of chromoluminarism of divisionism like that found in the paintings of the impressionist painter, Georges Seurat. Seurat’s landscapes were remarkable not only for their impressionist use of colour and light, but also for the technique of keeping pigments distinct upon the canvas. Instead of mixing the colours, the points of individual pigments compel the viewer to combine the colours optically, rendering a canvas of individual coloured points into a credible landscape.
Here is the same image with a closer focus on the hem of the lady’s skirt (the one with the red parasol, who is walking with the little girl), where you can see the dots of pigment that Seurat used to create the image:
As Shakespeare does in his drama and poetry, Seurat does not blend his colours, but instead leaves them distinct, promoting the creative engagement of the viewer’s mind, which bridges the gaps between the points to render the landscape as a whole.
In this case, the eye, or mind, of the beholder crafts the picture, participating in the creation in the same way that Shakespeare’s plays encourage a kind of creative participation from the reader or, even moreso, from the audience. Because the framed elements demand our participation to reach a sense of completion, creativity becomes mutual. These paintings and plays are not imposed upon a passive viewer, but more accurately are elicited from them, making the viewer or the audience an integral part of the creative act. While all art may arguably do this to a greater or lesser degree, the viewer’s creative response seems to be more specifically engineered into such works that deliberately provide the kind of creative interpretive space offered by those of Shakespeare and Seurat.
In a similar fashion, a scrying glass or stone, whether Merlin’s magic mirror, a piece of obsidian or other shiny surface, like the crystal crystal ball pictured above, usually presents a combination of depth and reflection to the gaze. Somewhere between the viewer’s attention, the viewer’s subconscious mind, images perceived in the reflective surface, and the collective nature of ‘reality’, creative connections may be made that allow the gazer to see things that are remote in time and space. The trick to actually seeing anything supposedly lies between the actual viewing and the viewer’s receptive state–which creates a kind of empty space that may ‘pick up’ ideas or events, whether or not these have actually yet manifested. Thus, various kinds of ‘between-ness’ seem to accompany the creative artistic act, offering different potential visions of the past, present, and the future.
The mythological soothsayer, Tiresias, who (among other things) tells Oedipus that he will murder his father and marry his mother, gives us an example of embodied dualities. Blind, but with a ‘second sight’ that enabled him to ‘see’ and predict the future, his vision was arguably greater than that of his sighted companions. His experience was broader as well. Legend has it that the goddess, Hera, transformed him into a woman because he once struck two copulating snakes with his staff. Remaining a woman for seven years, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, and married and bore children. After seven years, Tiresias resumed his masculinity, but he retained a broader perspective because he had lived life from two different points on the gender spectrum.
Of course, in a more general sense, poetry (and drama) are inextricably linked to both magic and prophecy, with verse itself retaining properties of both conjuration and prophetic pronouncement. Language is power in many senses. Heimskringla: The Lives of the Norse Kings, by Icelandic poet and statesman, Snorri (Snorre) Sturlason, readily demonstrates that Norse ruling authority was inextricably linked to poetry, with each jarl (king) having a scald (poet) dedicated to preserving his deeds, and many jarls being accomplished scalds themselves.****
The Carmina Gadelica, collected from the Gaelic speaking parts of Scotland between 1860 and 1909, by folklorist, Alexander Carmichael (who worked as an exciseman), reveals a society preoccupied with magical charms, many of which also serve as prayers or hymns.***** The work is seen as a reflection of the widespread unrest in more remote parts of Scotland, especially in the Highlands at the time, but it also indicates an underlying belief in literary pronouncements that might influence the human future. Of course, ‘modern’ forms of religious observance also use language, scriptural passages, prayers, and/or hymns, as a form of incantation, as the basis for conjuring a variety of outcomes ranging from goodwill to spiritual communion.
The Dream of the Rood (dream of the tree/cross), possibly one of the oldest surviving works of English literature, is presented as a vision:
As a ‘dream’ of Christ’s crucifiction and subsequent entry into heaven, the poem offers the possibility of transcending what seems to be a dark world, vaguely fraught with peril. While not exactly a scrying crystal, the poem does present the vision of a better kind of future, an affirmation of spiritual ascendance that has served as the basis for one of the largest religions in the world.
Yet, other poems may be seen as incantations too, as spells in a sense. Here is one, a ward against death, an ode to, and a vision of a kind of immortality:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
William Shakespeare, sonnet 18
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Here is Dame Harriet Walter reading Shakespeare’s sonnet 18:
Lest it should be thought that this link between poetry and magic has been forgotten or abandoned, or even overshadowed by more contemporary concerns, here is a more recent poem that remains conscious of its roots, also serving as a kind of magical invocation:
INCANTATION
Incantation by Czeslaw Milosz*******
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
Perhaps using words as conjuration has fallen out of fashion. Or, perhaps it is now widely thought too late, our compounding of dire, dystopian futures having brought us where we are–tottering on the brink of our own end, our planet nearly engulfed in flames. I honestly don’t think so, though. Not just yet. Our end need not be like that predicted for (and met by) Richard III in the play. We may still use our words as judiciously as our resources in an effort to craft something else. We need to conjure new worlds for ourselves instead of lashing out with words of destruction, bludgeoning and bullying in public forums as world leaders are often wont to do?
We can envision the greater good, after all. And if we can see it, certainly we can find ways to realise it too. Someone once said that it is a terrible cliché to say that the real answer to most questions lies in love. Perhaps. But like most clichés, this one is also true. We can see healing, creation, grace, and we can see a world where all these work in concert. If writers write it, and if leaders read and pay attention to it, perhaps those incantations will begin to change the world for all of us. Or maybe we don’t need any current leader. Maybe we can lead our thoughts, ourselves, our world collectively now. Not that incantations alone will be enough, of course. But at least they will be a sound beginning.
Let us think not only of ourselves but also of each other, and starting with our words, our writing and our speech, begin to weave more promising tomorrows. What kindness can we offer to the next person we encounter? The next person who reads our work? How might we help them to success? Let us offer that now.
Thank you all, always, for reading. I wish you the very best of days, of weeks, of lives. I wish you good company, dappled time brimming with hilltops and clear running streams, green trees, and rich autumn fields. I wish you smiles and understanding, and all the wondrous things you may know, that await you just around the corner of those long golden afternoons that you remember. May you abide there, in joy, peace, and plenty.
*Often cited as one of the best guitar players of all time, Stevie Ray Vaughan won six Grammy Awards, and was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and the Musicians Hall of Fame. He was widely associated with the 1980s resurgence of the blues. He died in a helicopter crash in 1990.
**Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Qveene. Edited by A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki. Oxon, England: Routledge, 2013. Note that although this is the standard scholarly edition (and it is excellent), the Penguin paperback offers a more affordable solid alternative.
***This blog has featured some of his work previously, but interested readers are encouraged to consult Philip Davis’ works on Shakespeare. Sudden Shakespeare is a good start:
Davis, Philip. Sudden Shakespeare: the Shaping of Shakespeare’s Creative Thought. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003.
****Snorri Sturlason (1179 – 1241) was an Icelandic poet and historian who was twice elected lawspeaker of the Althing, the Icelandic Parliament. He based his Heimskringla on the lost history of ancient kings, Hryggjarstykki. Also worth consulting is Snorri Sturlason’s Prose Edda, which gives us a much clearer understanding of how old Norse literature worked:
Sturluson, Snorri. Heimskringla or the Lives of the Norse Kings. New York: Dover Publ., 1990.
Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology. Edited by Jesse L. Byock. London: Penguin Books, 2005.
*****Carmichael, Alexander. Charms of the Gaels: Hymns and Incantations: with Illustrative Notes on Words, Rites and Customs, Dying and Obsolete. Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1994.
A nice example of a sleep prayer may be read here:
https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/cg1/cg1038.htm
******A translation of the Dream of the Rood by Dr. Aaron K. Hostetter of Rutgers University may be read here: https://anglosaxonpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/dream-of-the-rood/
*******Milosz, Czeslaw. The Collected Poems 1933-1987. New York: Ecco Press, 1988.
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was a Polish poet who exiled to the United States after WWII, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. The poem was written in Berkeley, California in 1968, when Milosz was a professor there.