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FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2006
Copyright © 2005 by Camille Paglia
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published ifi hardcover in
the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York, in 2005.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Permission to reprint previfausly ppblished material
may be found following the acknojvledgments.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Paglia, Camille, [date]..
Break, blow, burn / Camille Paglia.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. English poetry—History and criticism. 2. American poetry—
History and criticism. I. Title.
^R502.P25 2005
821.009—dc22
2004056573
Introduction
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7.
W illiam Shakespeare, Sonnet 2.9
W illiam Shakespeare, The Ghost’s Speech
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John Donne, “ The Flea”
2.0
5
7
John Donne, Holy Sonnet I
John Donne, Holy Sonnet'XIV
George Herbert, “ Church-monuments”
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3°
34
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George Herbert, “ The Quip”
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8
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George Herbert, “ Love”
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Andrew Marvell, “ To His Coy Mistress”
11 W illiam Blake, “ The Chimney Sweeper”
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47
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12.
W illiam Blake, “ London”
W illiam Wordsworth, “ The World Is Too Much w ith Us”
W illiam Wordsworth, “ Composed upon Westminster
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Bridge”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “ Ozymandias”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “ Kubla Khan”
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7t
Walt Whitman, Song o/’Myse//
Emily Dickinson, “ Because I Could N ot Stop forDeath”
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Vmtage ISBN-10: 0-375-72539-3
Vintage ISBN-13: 978-0-3>5-72539-5
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Book design by M . Kristen Bearse
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Emily Dickinson, “ Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers”
Emily Dickinson, “ The Soul Selects Her Own Society”
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W illiam Butler Yeats, “ The Second Coming”
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W illiam Butler Yeats, “ Leda and the Swan”
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Printed in the United States of America
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www.vintagebooks.com
W illiam Shakespeare, Sonnet 7 3
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THE g h o s t ’s speec h
N o reck’ning made, but sent to my account
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W ith all my imperfections on my head.
O, horrible! O, horrible! M ost horrible!
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
I f thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.
30
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
The Ghost’s Speech
But howsomever thou pursues this act,
HAMtET I. V.34-40, 59-88
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her.
Now, Hamlet, hear.
’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forgM process of my death
Rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth,
5
The serpent that did sting thy father’s life
N ow wears his crown. . . .
Sleeping within my orchard.
My custom always of the afternoon.
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole
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W ith juice of cursed hebona in a vial.
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leperous distillment, whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
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The natural gates and alleys of the body.
And w ith a sudden vigor it doth posset
And curd, like eager droppings into milk.
The thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine.
And a most instant tetter barked about
20
M ost lazarlike w ith vile and loathsome crust
A ll my smooth body.
Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand
O f life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched.
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled.
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THE g h o s t ’s speec h
hakespeare the poet often burns through Shakespeare the drama­
tist, not simply in the great soliloquies that have become actors
set pieces but in passages throughout his plays that can stand alone as
poems. A remarkable example is the ghost’s speech in H am let, an ex­
cerpt from the midnight encounter of father and son on Elsinore’s
windy battlement. The description by Hamlet the elder of his grisly
murder by a treacherous brother, who stole his throne and wife, is a
magnificent flight of strange, lurid poetry. The packed images twist
and turn with a Mannerist sophistication, fascinating yet repulsive.
“Now, Hamlet, hear”: with unnerving intensity and overbearing
paternal authority, the ghost (whom Shakespeare himself reputedly
played onstage) presses his heavy revelation on his agitated son (i).
Hearing is the medium of first shock, but as the saga unfolds, the vi­
sual and the tactile take over. Words seem sticky, insinuating, invasive
as we are drawn closer and closer to the grotesque scene. The speech
builds from a fabrication, the official story issued by the palace bu­
reaucracy: “ ’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, / A serpent
stung me” (z—3). The cover-up misleads a nation, stunned by grief
into a single thought: “So the whole ear of Denmark / Is by a forged
process of my death / Rankly abused” (3“ 5 )' The people are the body
politic: unsettled, manipulated, paranoid, they are reduced to a giant,
collective “ear” poisoned by lies—miming the king’s secret murder.
Government, which should serve truth, has become a fount of lies. The
tale has been craftily “forged” because Claudius, the new king, is him­
self a forgery or fake, never destined by God for the throne. An ear
“rankly abused” suggests force and trauma, a brutalizing of soft tissue.
“Rank” also has a stench of squalor and decay, the pollution caused
in H am let (as in Sophocles’ O edipus Rex) by corruption at the top.
The ghost’s narrative of the murder begins with the hypnotic lilt of
a lullaby: “Sleeping within my orchard, / My custom always of the
afternoon”(8-9). “Custom,” or routine, is predicated on trust, the il­
lusion of safety craved by all human beings. Taken unawares in his
“secure hour” by a disloyal ally, Hamlet senior recalls another king,
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Duncan of Scotland, slain in his bed by his host, Macbeth (“Sleep no
more! Macbeth does murder sleep,” M acbeth II.ii.33-34). For the
head of state to be at ease on leisurely afternoons means the nation is
at peace. In medieval and Renaissance iconography, a king napping
in his orchard would symbolize the harmony of nature and society:
cultivated land is nature ordered by human reason and design. The
well-managed gardhn, a major metaphor in Hamlet, is a paradigm of
the wisely governed state. When the true gardener is gone, the world
becomes (as young Hamlet complains) “an unweeded garden / That
grows to seed,” possessed by “things rank and gross in nature” (I.ii.
135-36). Mold, fungi, spiders, and rodents run wild, and fertility is
aborted. (“A rat?” cries Hamlet, mistaking Polonius for Claudius and
jamming his rapier through a bulging curtain; III.iv.z3.)
The Danish royal garden was once Eden before the Fall, with
Hamlet senior as Adam in the state of innocence. Thus the spurious
report of the king’s death by snakebite is figuratively true: the ghost
says, “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life /.N ow wears his
crown” (6-7). Claudius the crowned reptile (like a quaint emblem in
alchemy) is the primordial serpent with its inexplicable malice toward
God’s creation. Shakespeare’s serpent succeeds in capturing Eve: “O
Hamlet, what a falling-off was there,” laments the ghost, wounded
by his wife Gertrude’s quick coupling with Claudius (I.v.47). The
young prince inherits a world of disillusion after the Fall where,
thanks to the serpent’s machinations, human life is under sentence of
death. The ghost’s bitter sexual jealousy is magnified by voyeurism,
his exiled watching and his later aggressive solicitude for Gertrude.
Spying (a constant motif in this play) is also implicit in the stealth
(“stole”) with which Claudius ambushes his sleeping brother, who
is rendered passive and robbed of potency (10). The hushed sense
of trespass gives the murder a homoerotic tinge, as if its violation of
a hidden pocket o f the body rehearses male-on-male rape. Incest
is a shadowy undercurrent in the play: Hamlet is obsessively focused
on his mother’s bedroom activities, while Laertes, hullyihg his sister
Ophelia about her love life, wars with Hamlet for her affections.
In Renaissance England, poisoning, like stabbing in the back, was
a dishonorable way to Jdll, associated with cowards, fickle women.
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and devious Italians. Hence the regicide Claudius is prima facie un­
manly. Murder by ear is so esoteric that it makes the body (our own
as well as the king’s) seem hideously vulnerable. Quietly tipping his
vial in the orchard, Claudius resembles a gardener tenderly watering
a prize plant. An ancient architectural metaphor is also at work: the
true king (as in Egypt) is conflated with the palace, a citadel that
proves woefully easy to infiltrate and subvert. His ear is the palace
vestibule (“porches”), and his veins are “the natural gates and alleys
of the body” through which the poison, “swift as quicksilver,” slith­
ers like a snake or a draft of bad air, the medium of plague (12,
1 5 - 1 6 ). The poison’s stunning speed and amorphousness are drama­
tized in Shakespeare’s weaving of its multiple effects through eleven
dizzyingly headlong lines. The poison’s “enmity with blood of man”
is suggestively satanic (“Satan” means “the Adversary”), blocking
and canceling God’s work (14). “With a sudden vigor it doth posset /
And curd, like eager droppings into milk, / The thin and wholesome
blood”: the toxin mysteriously changes the blood chemically, clotting
and curdling it as when acid (“eager”) is dripped into milk {17-19).
The pure stream is churned to sludge— our mother’s milk of natural
emotion gone sour (compare “th’ milk of human kindness,” Macbeth
I.V.1 6 ). Drumming rhythms capture the choking of the king’s system
with mushrooming tumors and blobby growths like cottage cheese.
The poison is a “leperous distillment,” causing or feigning the
gangrene in leprosy (13). The surface of the king’s skin massively
erupts, while his warrior’s sinews and muscles melt away. The realm’s
supreme power is now a pitiable outcast (“most lazarlike,” like the
biblical beggar Lazarus, a leper covered with sores; 21). His flesh is a
raw wound, with the heroic human contours lost in a nauseating
mass of undifferentiated tissue. A scab (“a most instant tetter”) shoots
around his body: his skin crawls, along with ours—replicating the
sensation of the serpent-murderer creeping up on his prey (20-22).
Suppurating and drying in a magic flash, the king’s “smooth body,”
with its aristocratic refinement, is encased in a “vile and loathsome
crust.” It is bizarrely “barked about”—covered with bark like a tree
(a good example of Shakespeare’s typical conversion of nouns to
verbs). Animal to vegetable: the king has tumbled down the great
chain of being to the subhuman, where he becomes a worthless thing.
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a rotting log in a grove. The passage exploits a sensuous concreteness
of language to activate our atavistic horror at death and decay. We re­
coil at the staccato fusillade of consonants that make us hear the
crackling of the victim’s mammoth scab (20-21).
Robbed of his life, the king has also nearly lost his soul. He was
denied last rites (“unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled”) whereby he
could make confession and receive absolution (26). He was, he pro­
tests, “cut off even in the blossoms of my sin” (25). This image sees
man after the Fall as a plant bearing (in Baudelaire’s phrase) flowers
of evil. It’s as if sin is intrinsic to organic life. Indeed, “cursed hebona,” the plant (possibly henbane) crushed by Claudius for its poi­
son juice, represents a minute segment of nature damned by heaven
and charged with the death force ( i i ) . There is a striking contrast
between the king’s physical vulnerability and the severe mathematic
imposed by divine judgment: “N o reck’ning made, but sent to my
accdunt / With all my imperfections on my head” (27-28). The weight
of those “imperfections” is ominously transferred to Hamlet (“thou
noble youth”) through this very speech (5). If the son has “nature” in
him—that is, filial love—he must rise to duty (30). Sensitive, indecisive
Hamlet will be expected to “bear it not”—to avenge his father’s loss
of absolution by dragging the murderer to his own bloody reckoning.
The ghost’s journey into the painful past comes full circle with his
reference to “the royal bed of Denmark”—or more precisely to its
female occupant, whom the bed wraps like a pod (31). Claudius is
curiously erased from the picture. He is implicitly present as a con­
taminant, polluting and perverting the bed into “a couch for luxury
and damned incest”—sloth and unbridled lust divorced from dynas­
tic procreation (32). (Whether a woman’s remarriage to her husband’s
brother constitutes incest is debatable, though Hamlet, like John the
Baptist denouncing Herodias, clearly believes it is.) The royal bed as
valuable artifact and symbol of succession is found in literature as
early as Homer’s Odyssey. H a m le fs royal bed—declined by the king
for his open-air siestas—is repeatedly identified with the queen, pos­
session of whom is at issue throughout the play. The ghost’s program
of vengeance requires a liberation and purgation of the bed where
Hamlet himself may well have been conceived and born.
In forbidding his son to take punitive action against Gertrude
l8
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(“Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother
aught”), the ghost can be seen as motivated by compassion or by cru­
elty (34-35). “Leave her to heaven”—the highest court— “and to
those thorns that in her bosom lod ge/T o prick and sting her”: the
brambles of the unweeded garden have invaded the palace (3 S“ 37 )Does the king spare his queen out of sadism? Does he relish seeing
her suffer? His metaphor winds her heart (like the Sacred Heart of
Jesus) with a thorny vine: it’s the parasitic embrace of the serpent
usurper, Claudius. The queen is a fleshy fruit clutched, snared, stung,
and blighted. Sexual intercourse is imagined as intimate torture, an
excruciating love-death with the penis (“prick”) as a darting tongue
or poisoned fang. The hovering ghost suffers from his own wit­
ness and incapacity. Gertrude’s conscience, he insists, will be her own
best torturer: her erotic pleasures will always be commingled with
spiritual pain.
The ghost’s sinister speech is decadent insofar as it shows civiliza­
tion collapsing into the realm of gross matter. Divine creation is re­
versed as supersubtie evil dissolves forms and beings. Shakespeare
moves swiftly from suffocation and extinction in the garden to bond­
age and torment in the bedroom. The king’s triple cry— “O, horrible!
0 , horrible! Most horrible!”—is an aria close to a howl, requiring
consummate skill from an actor (29). Our ear, like the king’s, is in­
vaded by poison via the revolting images, which can barely be intelli­
gibly processed. The abandonment of a mutilated corpse like trash is
an affront to human dignity (compare “garbage” as the food of “lust,”
1. v.55-57). The king’s encrusted body is ugly as offal: is this why he
wears armor for his nightly walk? The charismatic warrior whom
his intellectual son fulsomely compares to Hyperion, the sun god, is
physically ravaged and shamed (I.ii.140). His armor warns of Nor­
way’s looming threat but also signifies a state of war among his near­
est and dearest—those lifetime conflicts of Freudian family romance
that Shakespeare so presciently grasped. The garden now breeds pes­
tilence: the king’s corpse, restless because of an unavenged murder,
exudes the sulfurous bad smells that fill the play.
In eerie mood and macabre detail, the ghost’s speech has a style
that would later be called Gothic. The flamboyant ghoulishness of
THE GHOST s SPEECH
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such passages in Shakespeare’s plays was disdained as vulgar by Neoclassicists, particularly in France. But the Gothic was triumphantly
reclaimed by Romanticism, which would in turn engender modern
horror films. The ghost’s serpentine speech, like the monumental Hel­
lenistic sculpture Laocoon (which shows a Trojan priest and his sons
strangled by sea snakes), reflects the anxieties of a turbulent “late”
phase of culture. The mature Shakespeare of the jittery Jacobean pe­
riod may have lost faith in politics and public ethics. Idealism fails in
H am let, as man regresses to the reptilian.