Today’s Totally Random
Line(s)
From
the besieged Ardea, all in post
Borne
by the trustless wings of false desire,
Lust-breathed
Tarquin leaves the Roman host,
And
to Collatium bears the lightless fire
Which,
in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire
And girdle with embracing flames the waist
Of Collantines fair love, Lucrece the
chaste.
-Narrator
Lucrece First Stanza
Prepare yourself: a bit of a lecture today.
Okay, that’s the opening of the 1,855 line Lucrece, sometimes published as The
Rape Of Lucrece. My book uses the former, and I prefer to use that
title even though, as foretold quite clearly in that first stanza, this poem is
going to center on the rape of Lucrece.
It’s a
wonderfully written seven lines. Trustless
wings of false desire and the
lightless fire of lust. It also gives a very good idea to the reader of
what the next 1,800 plus lines are going
to be about.
This long poem
can almost be compared to a short story written in verse, and it makes me
wonder what kind of novelist Will would have been. There is much of the
dialogue in his works that’s written in prose, and I guess, regarding my
question, we can look at the introduction to Lucrece.
This poem begins with The Argument which is a fairly long (historically
accurate?) tale of the events upon which the poem is based. Spoiler alert: don’t
read The
Argument unless you want to know exactly what’s going to happen in the
poem.
Regarding the art form of the long narrative, if I’m not mistaken, Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote was a contemporary of Will, and he is, by some, credited with the first novel. Yeah, pretty much all long narratives previous to that (and there’s a lot, going all the way back to Gilgamesh) had been written in some verse or another. Cervantes went and wrote a whole story strictly in prose (and Spanish) and in the process pioneered what became to be known as the novel. Since he was doing it in Spain, I don’t know that Will was ever exposed to it. As it was, the golden age of drama that Will was a huge part of had started just in time for him. Had he been born fifty years earlier the medium that he worked in may not have been there for him, and we would be left with only the sonnets and a handful of long poems, Lucrece among them.
But he wasn’t (luckily) born early, and he didn’t (regrettably?) discover that art of the long narrative. And that’s that.
Again, at 1,855 lines it’s a long poem. But it’s worth the read. Of course it is; it’s written by Will, isn't it?
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