Lear’s wife rests in peace and war.
His Queen died giving birth. Three years passed,
Lear’s prince was found dead
in his gold-leaf castle-bed,
two serpents playing on his pillow-slip,
the Gods in supine negligence.
In a manner of speaking, Lear
is drawn, quartered in and out of bed,
his limbs tied to horses sent in opposite directions.
The King’s Fool says, “Poor uncle, the Prince died
of a serpent’s tooth, a grateful child.”
Regan and Goneril rub purple onions
on their cheeks to show Lear real tears.
Cordelia hoping to comfort her father
plays the lute—her sisters study suitors.
(In the play, just before he dies, when Lear says,
“Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir,”
I still think he means his fly. You may say
he doesn't wear trousers from Moss Bros.)
The King, surrounded by lead, gold, and silver darkness,
walks among his frolicking soldiers who tell
and retell their war and love stories with advantages.
Whatever his commands, the conversation,
the company, place, circumstance, Lear’s heart
is prisoned in the body of his buried Queen.
Whatever the King’s purpose, quarter-thoughts,
half-thoughts, mirrors of her life
and death come to mind: age sixteen,
she crossed the perilous straits at Dover,
her merry French girlhood left behind,
her body kissing his body much amoured
by dames at court and country inns.
She was a spring garden, summer in March.
He remembers her glorious deflowering.
Lear commands: “Our Queen and son
will never be spoken of to us or painted again.”
Then he mumbles, “Names are knives.
Are not all the dead forgotten too soon or too late?”
From his throne, Lear sees at a distance
the happy fields he won in old battles.
He cannot always tell surrendered swords,
chained together like haystacks, from haystacks.
Nor can he separate grazing war horses
from toppled oaks. Lear knows he will soon surrender
his happy fields to the command of Death.
He does not need the cares and business of sovereignty.
Lear says, “Meantime we shall express our darker purpose.”