‘
“The diamond,--why, ‘twas beautiful and hard,
Whereto
his invised properties did tend;…” ’
-Narrator
A Lover’s Complaint Line 212
We are
finally back to a non-play line, and what do we have? It’s A Lover’s Complaint, a
poem by Will that’s 329 lines long. It tells the story of an old man coming
across a young girl out in the woods sitting by a stream. The girl tells the
old man the story of a young man that she fell for who then dumped her. Part of
the story (including today’s Totally Random line) is the young girl quoting
what the young man said to her. He had told her, among other things, that he’d
been with a lot of women and that many of them gave him gifts, including
precious stones. He lists out the gems and the first that he lists is diamonds,
and these two lines are about these diamonds. So really all we have for today
is that a diamond is as hard and as beautiful as it should be. Not very exciting.
Now I have
to be honest, I did my best to read most of these 329 lines last night. You
guessed right; I fell asleep. If you think Will’s plays are hard to understand,
you should try this poem. And I was reading a fully annotated version. It’s just
really difficult to follow. This morning I found a good summary of the poem if
you’re interested.
If you read
the summary first (and it’s pretty short) it of course makes Will’s words
easier to understand. But you still pretty much need an annotated version. And
there is a spoken version out there on the web if you’re interested. Honestly,
I really wasn’t.
Apparently
this is another one of those Will works that has some serious academic thought
that it’s not really Will’s work. What else is new.
I did have
one very striking thought when reading this poem. There is a band called the
Gabe Dixon Band and they have tune called And
The World Turned. The tune is about a girl standing on a rock by the water
and lamenting a lost love. It kind of seemed (at least to me) that Mr. Dixon
had just read this poem when he wrote that song. I found the song on YouTube if
you want to take a listen. There’s a good chance that you won’t hear what I
heard in terms of relation to the poem, but there it is.
Finally, my
compilation has fifty-seven pages of non-play materials; sonnets and poems.
That’s about 5%. We’ve done 72 random selections and this is our second
non-play selection. That’s about 3%. So we’re not too far off and I maintain
that the random selection system is working just fine, thank you. Also, this
poem takes up 3 pages of my 1,252 page compilation, so there’s about a .2%
chance of coming back here on any given day. That’s .2, as in 2 in 1,000
chance. That being said, we’ll probably be back here tomorrow. Ooof.
These are the guys. I saw them as the backup act for Loggins and Messina and their song reminds me of A Lover's Complaint. What do you think?
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