Thus sang the uncouth swain to th'oaks and rills,
The pantheon of English verse admits two men above the rest: Milton the supreme genius, and Shakespeare, who has given work to actors great and meh for centuries. It is fitting that Eliot, almost as great a genius as Milton, loathed the man. Poets...
I saw Ian McKellen in Coriolanus in 1985. Some 30 minutes before the curtain, my grandmother interrupted our wine-soaked perambulation with a muttered exhortation, and we scuttled into a lift. My tight red jeans and the wine, with my adolescent meh, meant I did not look up.
“That was John Gielgud!” she breathed, as a trio of silver-haired patricians walked away. “He certainly looked you up and down.”
Yet1 once more, O ye laurels, and once more
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forc'd fingers rude
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his wat'ry bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.