Green eggs and Hamlet

(With enormous gratitude to Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss, for his pioneering Green Eggs and Ham.)

I am Sam. Sam I am.

Not a yam. No, no. Just Sam.

Will you try green eggs and Hamlet?

I will not try them, Sam I amlet.

I do not like green eggs and Hamlet. I do not like them, Sam I amlet.

Wait. What the hell are you on about? “Sam I amlet”?!? Really?!? What the actual F?!? What is wrong with you? That doesn’t make any sense!

I do not like that guy, Polonius. I prefer the Monk, Thelonious.

Now, just a minute!!

I do not care for wan Ophelia, I much prefer a blue lobelia!

Lobelia? Really? Please just stop this right now!

I would not drown her in a brook, I would not drown here with her book,

Not where a slanting willow grows, or all those flowers tied with bows.

Argh! Really?!? You’re just rhyming nonsensically!

But this I know for certain, damnlet! I do not like green eggs and Hamlet!

NO!

I do not like them in a castle. Preparation’s quite a hassle!

I don’t like suspicious kings. Their guilty consciences have stings.

I don’t like sycophantic friends who lie to me for their own ends.

Please keep my father’s ghost away, I won’t like what he’s going to say.

Whatever tale it might unfold, vengeance is still best served cold.

I do not like green eggs and Hamlet, I do not like them, Sam I amlet.

Ok, that’s enough! Just stop this idiotic rambling right now!!!

If I know what they’re not seeing, it might make me question being.

Besides, I like Laertes well, I would not send his soul to hell.

Knock, knock, knock and ring the bell; summon Duncan, he will tell

The sceptre, learning, physic, must

All follow this and come to dust.

That’s not even from Hamlet! No more rhyming now, I mean it!

Anybody want a peanut?*

For I alone am left to tell thee, where thou goest remains to see,

Except that summers day, as God, white whale, or devil may,

As the King of the Cats, he comes, by the pricking of my thumbs.

Whatever words that man might say, pumpkin head, shirt stuffed with hay,

We cannot lead the mushrooms dance, or prick the moon upon our lance,

Lest we be turned into a stag, fleeing hounds and torn to rags,

In that dismal boneshop foul, in our hearts, where we all howl

To see the best minds of our generations, left with no remuneration,

Tortured by the madness, damnlet, of these damned green eggs and Hamlet!

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? No. No. Thou art less comparable

And more fearsome, thy canker blossom striving to the sky

With broken wings to fly too close to the sun. Day is done.

Or, like the boy on his father’s horse, Elf King pursuing through the course

of a fearsome ride.

“My son, wherefore seek’st thou thy face thus to hide?”
“Look, father, the Erl-King is close by our side!
Dost see not the Erl-King, with crown and with train?”
“My son, ’tis the mist rising over the plain.”***

Goethe’s poem scored by Schubert, guarding gates, as does Hubert,

Except these are gates of life, poetically beset by strife,

As each golden promise beckons, with our lives, we must reckon.

So, mortality’s a struggle, only so much we can juggle.

You’re getting yourself worked up over nothing. Just calm down.

(Quietly) I’ve told you,

I do not like green eggs and Hamlet. I do not like them, Sam I amlet.

It brings the Elf King much too close, Hamlet pursued by that ghost,

Written both in verse and prose.

Just no more, please. I beg you. Stop. Please.

Restless ghosts cannot boast like St. Dunstan pulling on the nose

of Satan, just to bring him down, and when he had him on the ground,

he opened wide the devil’s jaws, and put green eggs into his maw,

and then he made him watch the Hamlet, which finished him,

Sam I amlet.****

Do not speak to me of violins, of trumpets, or of angel voices

They do not tempt me with such choices, as ‘to be or not to be’

Strikes deep into the heart of me. Like the Once-ler and his thneed

No matter what we seem to plead.

Truffula trees all cut down, seas rise up and then we drown.*****

Man has lost his mare again and all shall be ill.

All shall be green, more profits than we’ve ever seen.

For we do mock the meat we feed upon, the land we live upon.

No, I tell you, Sam I amlet, I won’t consume green eggs and Hamlet.

But, don’t you see that Hamlet’s good?! Shakespeare’s like essential food,

For thinking, feeling, understanding, compassing experience, banding

Us together in what to do and not to do.

Well, I’ll look. I’ll take a look. I’ll read a smattering in this book,

This old book here in my house, chewed on by some errant mouse,

and yet the words I still can see, I’ll see what it might bring to me.

Tell me after you’ve read a bit. I’ll be here, awaiting it.

. . .

. . .

I read that play, I must confess, although I thought I’d like it less,

I like it greatly Sam I amlet, I really like this play called Hamlet!

And if there were some sort of way, I would go to see this play,

I would see Timon, I would see Lear, I would see them all right here!

These are most excellent I think,

They are not dull, they do not stink.

They help us see and understand

People, both the mean and grand;

Now that you’ve opened up this door,

I’ll treasure Shakespeare evermore.

EPILOGUE:

That ghost will always be chasing us, crown of the cats, elf king, or Fritz Leiber’s smoke ghost.******* Whatever form, it will always be chasing us, or we will always be chasing it. More than academic employment, we seek a level of competence, a level of excellence, in literature, drama, and the other arts. Merely getting by is no longer enough. We must excel. We must broaden and deepen our outlook in all the ways before the ‘same old, same old’ of regarding people and planet as mainly someone else’s problem grinds us away to ash beneath the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg:

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.*******

The true challenge may lie beyond simply educating, or beyond educating as many of us think of that. Solutions to our challenges tend to accompany innovation. People decry scholarship for being stuck in its ways, for failing to use methods that might transcend its often (sometimes necessarily) narrow operative channels. ‘Academics easily become dry, detached, and lose the meaning of learning by subscribing to single meanings born of tunnel vision, or circumscribed perspective. Yet, engaging critically need not exclude engaging creatively as well. The best critical work may be as creative as any work of art. Merging the two does not make monsters. Instead, it tends to foster an aesthetic discernment that is too often discarded when one method is favoured over the other. Critical evaluation can promote a deeper understanding of the arts, but when we dissect works, impaling them on pins and dessicating their delicate expressive tissues with minute and incremental analyses, we most often lose the butterfly to scrutiny. Beauty may lie in a whole far beyond its parts. Should we analyse too closely, or compartmentalize lovely elements, we risk losing the myriad colourful possibilities of our engagement in misguided attempts to distill beauty into something we might further use, reproduce, or otherwise reductively describe.

*Borrowed shamelessly from Andre the Giant’s line in the Princess Bride: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP5-qJSzDUg

**The tale of the King of the Cats may be read here: https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/meft/meft32.htm

***Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1853). “The Erl-King”. The Poems of Goethe. translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring. p. 99.

****Hone, William (1825). The every-day book, or, The guide to the year, p. 670.
St Dunstan, as the story goes,
Once pull’d the devil by the nose
With red-hot tongs, which made him roar,
That he was heard three miles or more.

*****More about the Once-ler and his thneeds may, of course, be found in The Lorax by Dr. Seuss: Seuss, Dr. The Lorax. New York: Random House, 1971.

******More of Karin Brown’s fine photographic work at Imbolc Photographic Art on Instagram and at https://brownkcd.wixsite.com/imbolc.

*******Fritz Leiber’s story “Smoke Ghost” may be found in: Leiber, Fritz. Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions. Seattle, WA: Midnight House, 2001. Originally published in 1941, the story originally appeared in The Weird, and established Leiber at the forefront of writers who focused on the uncanny and unsettling nature of our increasingly urban landscapes.

*******These famous lines appear in any copy of The Great Gatsby, in chapter two (page numbers vary by version). Here’s a recent one: Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Penguin Books, 2019.