Voices from the Past Part 97

On the blue frozen Thames

skaters zip past people, booths, flags.

A giant ox roasts on a giant spit.

Arm in arm, Shakespeare and Ellen skate:

Over a gla.s.sy spot in the ice they peer down

where a blue cloak floats:

fish below.

Singing carolers pa.s.s on skates.

Henley Street

February 8, 1615

O

ne year the Thames froze and above London Bridge it became a market, hobbled with ragged booths, stalls, flags and streamers, peopled with courtiers, beggars, soldiers, priests, merchantmen and their families. An ox was roasted-and as it steamed and smoked-walkers cl.u.s.tered around the carca.s.s as if it were Holland.

Skaters spun close, stopping to chat or buy and eat, then spun away over the ice.

For days the surface was free of snow and one afternoon I brought Ellen, and we skated arm in arm, the sky unblemished; we swished between ice-bound frigates, toqued sailors leaning over, waving and jeering. It was almost Christmas and carolers sang around bonfires.

Royalty had set up tents and we were welcomed there, the tents and flags reflected in the ice, purple, red, yellow-pennants squares gay-men and wenches tippling- musicians trying to keep their feet warm, strumming bravely.

Ellen, in plaid scarf, yellow cloak and jeweled tam, stands alongside a striped purple and gold tent, laughs alongside the scabby hulk of a frigate, warms her hands before a fire. Ellen...your face is real... I can reach out and take your hands...you smile and sway in the wind.

Singing with the carolers, your breath puffs its toadstool alongside my mushroom, and we laugh and hug each other. Inside a carpeted tent, we toast "Wa.s.sail!"

and glance at velvet cushions heaped in a corner.

Henley Street

Stratford

Mine was the wish to bind society together, expose the floor of heaven, make immortal real, show man's folly and labor, extol faith and uphold beauty. Beauty, as I felt it at the outset of my career, is no longer here: it is a long way from Venus and Adonis to Henry VIII: there were grim diversions, rude and costly failures: my goal it seems is beggared: if I had the capacity I would reach back to beauty and carry it forward with greater maturity: I am thinking of poetic beauty.

Farewell! You were too dear for my possessing,

for such riches where is my deserving...?

I lost sensibility and communion in pursuit of plot and character for the ricochet of horror and death, for the mockery of crime and subterfuge.

At times, I was in sleep a king-but on waking, no such man.

I have been awake to my losses a long while: there was no recouping them in France and Italy, alone with hegemony of rocks, promontories, beaches, hierarchy of seas a.s.sailing nakedness...here in Stratford, here I have illness as exchange.