[In the essay below, Jensen examines the influence of William Shakespeare on Nemerov's verse, stating that Shakespeare is "the guide and genius of [Nemerov's] poetic achievement. "]

John Lehmann, writing in his autobiography, claimed for Shakespeare the greatest intellectual and creative sovereignty over the minds and feelings of both the writers who followed him and all those whose literary inheritance derives from the English tradition. Shakespeare, he declared,

was the key to the whole of English literature, the mastermind that determined its course and depth and vitality so fundamentally that we can scarcely conceive what our imaginative life—perhaps even our moral values—would be like without him.

His assertion, in its nature more of a celebratory declaration than a critical argument, was picked up and expanded upon by T. J. B. Spencer in his British Academy Lecture, "The Tyranny of Shakespeare." Spencer argued that "The history of Shakespeare criticism …. has connexions with the production of poetry; and it is likely to be an unreal thing if we attempt to write it abstracted from the moulding influence of Shakespeare's writings upon subsequent literature." In this, Spencer was not merely agreeing with Lehmann but with a host of nineteenth-century writers including, notably, Ruskin, who claimed that "the intellectual measure of every man since born, in the domains of creative thought, may be assigned to him, according to the degree in which he has been taught by Shakespeare."

But the tyranny of Shakespeare, at once so widespread and so various in its manifestations, is difficult to measure. In Spencer's words, "Influences that become too pervasive lose their bright particularity, and defy the ordinary methods of describing literary causation." Harold Bloom's more recent theoretical formulation of the problem Spencer described focuses less on the details of textual influence than on questions of the psychology of creation growing out of one author's awareness of another's presence in his literary-intellectual background and in his works. The consciousness, as Bloom puts it, of a strong poet, makes the tyranny of Shakespeare something that the modern author must confront directly, recognizing his indebtedness and coping in some fashion with the "anxiety of influence."

Among contemporary poets, Howard Nemerov offers a striking instance of a writer whose indebtedness to Shakespeare is both considerable and self-conscious. Nemerov is so aware of Shakespeare's presence in his work, so given to clinching his critical arguments with quotations from Shakespeare, so supple and inventive in his employment of Shakespearean allusions in his poetry that he may be said to have transformed the tyranny of Shakespeare into a benevolent timocracy in which he can claim a legitimate share.

One measure of Nemerov's debt to Shakespeare appears quite simply in the titles of several poems. "In the Glass of Fashion," "The Second-Best Bed," "A Lean and Hungry Look," "Holding the Mirror up to Nature" all depend for their understanding at least in part on a reader's sense of the allusion and the context that it summons up. Other poems, such as "In the Market-Place" or "The Town Dump," use Shakespearean quotations as epigraphs. In the former instance, an exchange between Polonius and Hamlet—

Do you know me, my lord?
Excellent well; you are a fishmonger.—

introduces a poem packed with contradictions whose theme suggests the deep potential for evil in all of life. In this market-place "The armored salmon jewel the ice with blood"; and though it is noon and "soft August" still the speaker feels the power of the day to stir "a chill cloud" and raise "a silver flood To savage in the marrow of my weir." In the second case, Nemerov takes an epigraph from King Lear—

The art of our necessities is strange,
That can make vile things precious—

and quotes from the passage once more in the final section of the poem:

Among the flies, the purefying [sic] fires,
The hunters by night, acquainted with the art
Of our necessities, and the new deposits
That each day wastes with treasure, you may say
There should be ratios.

"Necessities" in the design of the poem become not required things but rather perceptions imposed upon individuals by certain habits of thought. Thus "dealers in antiques / … prowl this place by night" in the hope of some discovery,

Thus too those who need to find ratios, says the speaker, "may sum up / The results, if you want results." But over against that summing up,

In place of "necessities" of thought, we have an alternative possibility. The mathematical "results" are not allowed to stand as a final solution; instead, the poet "will add" to them, and what he adds brings to the poem a final ambiguity reminiscent of that summoned by the pigeons at the close of Stevens' "Sunday Morning" sinking "downward to darkness, on extended wings."

Rosalie Colie once wrote of the shaping power of paradox in King Lear, remarking how the play turns so insistently to parodoxical figures as a means of arriving at its final truth. It is this aspect of King Lear that Nemerov seizes on in "The Town Dump": this final depository where "nothing finishes," a sty that may become "Someone's heaven," "Being" which "ends up / Becoming some more" and—on another level, where paradox approaches oxymoron—"dreamy midden." All of these figures, along with more fully developed images—"the lobster," who "lifts / An empty claw in his most minatory / Of gestures"; "banana peels / No one will skid on, apple cores that caused / Neither the fall of man nor a theory / Of gravitation"—bring "The Town Dump" into a rewarding series of thematic connections with King Lear. Like the play, Nemerov's poem develops around a few related central themes that unite questions of perception and judgment, appearance and value, dissolution and redemption from loss. If the poem finally provides no clear answers, it does—like tragedy generally and like Lear in particular—force us to look at the most troubling questions. And like Lear, like all great tragedies, it invites us to contemplate the mystery of beauty sprung from waste, of wisdom not wholly accessible but undeniably present even in the midst of suffering and defeat. Thus Nemerov uses Lear not merely as a point of reference, not merely allusively, but as a means of enlarging his own poem's range of meaning and bringing its themes more strikingly into our field of awareness.

Critics have commented extensively on Nemerov's recurrent attention to the relationship between perception and reality, his continuing exploration of the question of "how thought ever emerged (if it ever did) out of a world of things." Julia Bartholomay has demonstrated how productive these concerns have been of images and symbols that abound in Nemerov's poetry; and Nemerov himself has written of a whole class of figures he describes as effigies, "including by analogy with the form and function of statues such metaphorical extensions as photographs, Santa Claus, mannequins in shop windows, snowmen, famous and influential people, and even the unsuccessful heroes turned to stone by the Gorgon's head."

Another figure of nearly comparable importance is that of the stage as a place of created or feigned reality. Often Nemerov will simply echo Jacques' famous speech as a shorthand means of bringing this figure into play. In an early poem, "Portrait of Three Conspirators," one of the three figures of the title is a man "who no longer believes the world a stage." The line returns three more times during the course of the poem. In the fifth stanza,

It is night, and it is the season of winter.
It is time, and time passes, and
The world is not a stage.

In the seventh stanza, the speaker reports a kind of dialogue he has with his imperturable "assassins,":

I say to them, I must die, because the world
Is not a stage.

But they remain unmoved:

Nothing can change them. They sit there as if
Immortal, and mutter, like actors on a stage,
Of art and wisdom, and a change of life.

This final comment on the inefficacy of poetic creation suggests (even requires) a contrast with Yeats's golden bird, who sings "of what is past, or passing, or to come." Where the Irish poet speaks of escaping the limitations imposed by "any natural thing," Nemerov denies the power of art, whose "words … break against / Implacable existence."

In "The Loon's Cry," from Mirrors and Windows (1958), Nemerov turns to the same problem, though here he provides it with a historical context. Set in a landscape that symbolizes the intrusion of modern life into the world of nature—"down where the railroad bridge / Divides the river from the estuary"—the poem presents a speaker "fallen from the symboled world" who envies "those past ages … / When … the energy in things / Shone through their shapes." That past, he believes, was far more readable than the present. Orderly and well-balanced, it was characterized by a satisfying economy of design and function:

That past was, above all, purposive; "The world a stage," its inhabitants were actors in a drama of divine shaping, "maskers all / In actions largely framed to imitate / God and his Lucifer's long debate."

But the energy and meaning of art hold more promise here than in "The Three Conspirators." Midway through the poem the bird's "savage cry" causes the speaker to imagine himself as "Adam … / Hearing the first loon cry in paradise." Its final stanza brings the poem's two chief symbols together:

The loon again? Or else a whistling train,
Whose far thunders began to shake the bridge.
And it came on, a loud bulk under smoke,
Changing the signals on the bridge, the bright
Rubies and emeralds, rubies and emeralds
Signing the cold night as I turned for home,
Hearing the train cry once more, like a loon.

Thus "The Loon's Cry" goes farther than most of Nemerov's poems in uniting the world of created reality (the world shaped and ordered by mankind) and the world of nature. The world is not a stage, but neither does it stand exclusively as a mockery of the artist's effort to understand its meaning.

The relation of the poet's vision to the world—specifically the world of nature—is again Nemerov's subject in "Elegy for a Nature Poet." Here too the poem turns in part on an allusion to As You Like It. Of the dead poet, the poet asserts that there was

Nothing too great, nothing too trivial
For him; from mountain range or humble vermin
He could extract the humble parable—
If need be, crack the stone to get the sermon.

Duke Senior's praise of rustic life and "the uses of adversity" celebrates an existence that

Finds tongue in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything

As is often the case with Nemerov, the poetic working-out of an intellectual or philosophical problem offers as well a field for play. "Elegy for a Nature Poet" illustrates this habit in a variety of ways: in its sly joking with the terms of its basic oppositions, in its surprising shifts of tone, and in its deft management of the conventions of its genre.

The death of the nature poet comes, ironically, from too intimate a contact with nature. On his last walk, he ventured unprotected into her domain:

Through the witty playfulness of the poem, Nemerov sets the poet's fictions over against nature's truth. The dead poet was, above all else, pleased with his role.

His gift was daily his delight, he peeled
The landscape back to show it was a story;
Any old bird or burning bush revealed
At his hands just another allegory.

But the final judgment on him (and on his work) is the ironic sentence that nature always imposes on those foolish enough to try shaping her to their desires.

And now, poor man, he's gone. Without his name
The field reverts to wilderness again,
The rocks are silent, woods don't seem the same;
Demoralized small birds will fly insane.

Rude nature, whom he loved to idealize
And would have wed, pretends she never heard
His voice at all, as, taken by surprise
At last, he goes to her without a word.

The small birds are "demoralized" as they fulfill conventional elegiac expectations; but more importantly they are "de-moralized" as they are free from the impositions of one who would see a pattern in their randomness.

Thus Nemerov challenges Duke Senior's sentimental pastoralism, bringing nature itself to witness against and rebuke those who would read in its mysteries easy truths. As You Like It does not come fully into view in the brief compass of "Elegy for a Nature Poet," but one does see there a complex of attitudes arising from the major pastoral-romantic themes of the play. Nemerov confronts those attitudes with a skepticism that operates by means of comic deflation. The questions are the familiar and serious ones of reality and perception, of art as reflection or source of meaning. As in "Small Moment" one discovers death; whatever is invented cannot last: "Without his name / The field reverts to wilderness again."

The "Seven Ages of Man" speech of Jacques in As You Like It, apart from providing a set piece for generations of high school elocution students, serves in the play as a counter-poise to its romantic and pastoral idealism. Nemerov, writing on "The Four Ages" turns to another of Shakespeare's plays to aid his analysis, which proceeds in terms drawn from the art of music. It is, he says, "de rigueur for myths to have four ages," though "Nobody quite knows why." In any event,

The first age of the world was counterpoint,
Music immediate to the senses

Not yet exclusive in their separate realms,
Wordlessly weaving the tapestried cosmos
Reflected mosaic in the wakening mind.

Though he offers no explanation for the change, Nemerov reports the end and the broken remnants of that first stretch of time:

That world was lost, though echoes of it stray
On every breeze and breath, fragmented and
Heard but in snatches, henceforth understood
Only by listeners like Pythagoras,
Who held the music of the spheres was silence
Because we had been hearing it from birth,
And Shakespeare, who made his Caliban recite
Its praises in the temporary isle.

In The Tempest, Caliban attempts to comfort Stephano and Trinculo, who have been frightened by Ariel's music.

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments
Will hum about my ears; and sometimes voices
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak'd,
I cried to dream again.

In "The Four Ages" the poet's myth traces a breakdown. Moving from "Music immediate to the senses," in the second age "words / Entered the dancing-space and made it song." The third age left only words and poetry,

Finally, the fourth age completes a movement from magical apprehension of pure sound to rational explanation. "Illusion at last is over" and one is left with "common prose," which is "Delighted to explain, but not to praise." It may be, though the poem's speaker seems not to think it a major issue, that myths require four ages so that they may match

Four seasons and four elements and four
Voices of music and four gospels and four
Cardinal points on the compass rose and four
Whatever elses happen to come in four.

What matters most is that

These correspondences are what remain
Of the great age when all was counterpoint
And no one minded that nothing mattered or meant.

Nemerov is careful in the poem to attribute to Shakespeare (not his creature Caliban) the power to detect echoes of the first age of the world. As argument, then, his poem exempts Shakespeare from the conflict that opposes the world's reality to the artist's perception. Instead, he is viewed as one who has access to the wondrous immediacy of the first age—"the tapestried cosmos / Reflected mosaic in the wakening mind."

This is the ground of Nemerov's wish, expressed with such telling poignancy in Journal of a Fictive Life:

The predicaments of my most characteristic and intimate imagery strangely belong to Shakespeare too, who resolved them by magical poetry in his Last Plays. May it happen to me also one day that the statue shall move and speak, and the drowned child be found, and the unearthly music sing to me.

The resolution of such "predicaments" is most likely to take place in poems that work at some remove from the actual details of Shakespearean language and plot detail. Again and again, Nemerov's "characteristic and intimate imagery" illuminates his dilemma as poet and thinker. Ross Labrie describes that dilemma most economically: "The insatiable hunger for meaning co-exists with the awareness that the meaning sought by the mind will invariably turn out to be the meaning imposed by the mind." For the most part, the poems which come closest to the magical resolution Shakespeare achieved in his last plays are less analytical and self-reflexive than the poems about Shakespeare. Yet the poems that develop out of an allusion to Shakespeare or take some Shakespearean character or play as their subject exemplify a central aspect of Nemerov's thinking about poetry. They do so, moreover, by making full use of a public awareness of Shakespeare; the poet can count, to an extraordinary degree, on his audience's adding something of their own commitment to Shakespeare to the field of interest created by the poem. This seems especially true of two poems that grow out of the materials of Hamlet, "Polonius Passing Through a Stage" and "Orphic Scenario," with its subtitle, "for a movie of Hamlet."

The first of these, "Polonius Passing Through a Stage," belongs to a long tradition of poems that isolate single characters from the plays, subjecting them to analysis or allowing them to speak for (and try to explain or justify), themselves and their actions. Walter De La Mare wrote a series of such poems, including one on Polonius in which he imagines the fictional character recognizing Sir Frances Bacon as his court fellow in corruption. The Czech poet Miroslav Holub describes a Polonius whose wily usefulness is an available commodity—"a pound of jellied / flunkey."

Nemerov's Polonius is a genuinely puzzled figure laboring to explain himself and his fate. In his attempt, he seems both pitiable and vaguely comic; in some ways, his efforts at self-justification recall the Herod of Auden's "For the Time Being." But where Auden's character degenerates into rant and banality ("I've tried to be good. I brush my teeth every night. I haven't had sex for a month. I object. I'm a liberal. I want everyone to be happy. I wish I had never been born."), Nemerov's becomes more complex, seeing himself as both an individual and as a dramatic figure, a mere counter in the theatrical patterns arranged by the playwright Shakespeare. Thus too the "stage" of the poem's title is both a stage in the speaker's development and the stage on which he acts out his appointed Shakespearean role.

In both cases, as he reviews his life now with the wisdom of retrospection, he believes he followed that injunction received as a child and delivered years later to his son: "Try to be yourself." Yet he can only judge that in the effort to do so he has failed; and his defense is the familiar, helpless one of all whose failure perplexes and defeats them: "I tried." The poem, in three six-line stanzas rhyming ababcc, treats past, present, and more recent past. The first stage tells of the speaker's childhood and early maturity, the third of his age, while the second seems to be a perpetual present in which the plays of Shakespeare are forever being performed. Surprisingly, they are presented by "The company in my Globe theater," apparently the mind or imagination of Polonius rather than Shakespeare's Globe.

Both in life and art, Polonius' efforts to be himself meet with frustration. "The blue annuities of silence some called / Wisdom," stored up over his youthful years, cannot shut out the reality of "sunstorms and exploding stars, / The legions screaming in the German wood." For most men, "Ten heavenly don'ts / Botch up a selfhood,"—i.e. a life defined by the commandments, though it be ruined, is nevertheless given some sort of shape. But Shakespeare as creator provides even less than the negative guidance of the decalogue: "where there's a Will / He's away." The result for Polonius as a Shakespearean character is that he finds himself, in language drawn from the play's chief line of imagery, "Rotting at ease, a ghostly doll"; he is troubled and perplexed by his own sense of unease: "What is that scratching on my heart's wall?" Finally, he reaches a condition like that of Lear in his madness, a connection borne out by an allusion to King Lear: "The silence grew / Till I could hear the tiniest Mongol horde / Scuffle the Gobi, a pony's felted shoe." Lear, in his wild ranting, imagines that

It were a delicate strategem to shoe
A troop of horse with felt. I'll put't in proof,
And when I have stol'n upon these son-in-laws,
Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!

Here is the issue of those "blue annuities of silence": a more profound and inescapable sense of evil, and finally death at the hand of Hamlet. It seems hard to say precisely what meanings are comprehended in "from the fiery pit that self-born bird / Arose"; but the immediate context suggests that the reference is primarily to Hamlet and that the phoenix, though certainly a plausible intention, fits less well. Hamlet is "self-born" as the images of "Among School Children" are ("both nuns and mothers worship images"), and he emerges from unearthly contact with his dead father to claim revenge on those responsible for the late king's death. The poem's closing lines once again merge the speaker of the poem and the Shakespearean character: "A rat! The unseen good old—/ That sort of thing always brings the house down." Hamlet's exclamation and Gertrude's report make up the first line, while the second is the character's resigned evaluation of his theatrical fate. Even here, though, Polonius' double role is captured in a kind of pun. His death is invariable a coup de theatre, but it also marks the imminent destruction of his family line.

"Polonius Passing Through a Stage" is not, like many of the poems about Shakespeare's plays or the characters who inhabit them, particularly self-reflexive in its operation. It does not turn us back to the play with any sense that we have access to the heart of its mystery. Rather, it moves out of the play to make a more generalized point about how one shapes identity and about the essentially solitary nature of that task. Yet if one sees the poem as an answer to the question, "How would Polonius explain himself?" it does provide an interpretation of his character and grounds for understanding his behavior throughout the play. What "they told the child" remains for the aging court counsellor a first principle of behavior. He wants to please, and his eagerness to do so emerges as mindless obsequiousness joined to self-celebrating garrulity. In this poem, Nemerov strikes an effective balance between source and invention, using as givens the character of Polonius and some elements of Shakespeare's own language but supplying from his own poetic resources the central thematic concern and the intellectual playfulness that create the work's striking tone and undeniable power.

What Nemerov achieves with "Polonius Passing Through a Stage" he attempts on a much larger scale in "Orphic Scenario," a poem from a section in Mirrors and Windows (1958) that includes "The Loon's Cry," "Lightning Storm on Fuji (Hokusai)," "Home for the Holidays," "Sunderland," "Moses," and "Ahasuerus." While this seems not to be a rigorous grouping, there are sufficient likenesses among the poems to suggest possible reasons for their placement. "The Loon's Cry," discussed earlier, treats the issue of art's relation to the world it proposes to imitate. This theme also shapes the poem on Hokusai's painting. "Moses" and "Home for the Holidays" explore the familiar Nemerov theme of contrasting (even opposed) perspectives. "Sunderland,"—which includes an allusion to Romeo and Juliet—and "Ahasuerus" are both self-consciously literary. In "Orphic Scenario" one sees the "predicaments of [Nemerov's] most characteristic and intimate imagery" expressed in a difficult and complex poem. The work's range—of allusion, of feeling—is enormous; in addition, it displays the poet's almost habitual disregard of consistency of tone. Thus a poem which takes up the grandest and most important of themes (time, the self, ways of knowing, orders of existence) contains as well gratuitous and ineffective puns (the egghead's Rorschach in the Holy Wood, "Meatier and more meet"). Perhaps it was her impatience with such unreconciled diversity that prompted Carolyn Kizer to say that in this poem "no amount of forcing can mobilize the dead-tired ideas."

The notion of "forcing," though, which implies a pattern or design into which the poet tries to fit pieces of his argument, seems foreign to the strategy of this poem, which works rather through the "predicaments" of imagery. Birth and death, egg and bleeding bull, constitute the encompassing extremities of this imagery. Light—as reflection, as stage device, as source of a version of reality (Plato's myth of the cave)—makes up its center. On this field of imagery, Nemerov develops his poem. "Orphic Scenario," with its descriptive subtitle, "for a movie of Hamlet," is circular in design. It moves from a description of the close of the play—

Bear Hamlet, like a soldier to the stage
(The world's a stage). And bid the soldiers shoot.
Loud music, drums and guns, the lights go up.

to

and from "Cheap? Yes, of course it's cheap." to "Cheaper, and yet more golden than before." Within this movement, the central theme of the poem is the relation of art and reality, the "tricks" of the stage or the camera set over against "the things we think we see and know."

The concerns of "Orphic Scenario" appear repeatedly in the other poems of Mirrors and Windows and in "The Swaying Form: A Problem in Poetry," first published in 1959. The knottiness of the poem—its circularity and reflexivity, the ambiguity of its reference—demonstrates the need to read it with certain words and ideas in mind, words and ideas that seem to dominate Nemerov's thought and writing during the period of the 'fifties and early 'sixties. These would include such words as "mirror," "window," "light," "lens," "screen," and objects or phenomena associated with them, such as reflection, illumination, shadowing, and many others. Thus it is true and not merely fashionable to say that "Orphic Scenario" is a poem about the creative process, about the writing of poetry; for the poem's design, or its struggle to achieve a design, illustrates perfectly Nemerov's definition of the writer's job of work:

Writing means trying to find out what the nature of things has to say about what you think you have to say. And the process is reflective or cyclical, a matter of feedback between oneself and "it," an "it" which can gain its identity only in the course of being brought into being, come into being only in the course of finding its identity.

Thus the question of theatrical tricks—Is the close of Hamlet cheap?—grows into other questions which have the effect of joining this theatrical illusion to illusions of other sorts. The stage image alters into that of a camera and perhaps also of a card game, even an unfair one—"This dark malodorous box of taken tricks"—but with the purpose of asserting that "reality's much the same"; and the speaker of the poem, anticipating a charge of begging the question, simplifies his responses:

Reality's where the hurled light beams and breaks,
Against the solemn wall, a spattered egg,
The seed and food of being.

Julia Bartholomay, arguing that Nemerov's key theme is "reflexivity of thought," identifies its expression in "Runes," where it also appears through the imagery of seed and egg. In "Runes," she says, "The secret of the seed, extracted by knowledge, is death (IV), though it is also life (XVI)."

Paradox, a multiplicity of illusions, difficulty even in locating a starting point—these are the experiences of a reader of "Orphic Scenario" just as they are the subjects of the poem itself. Here one may see in Nemerov's own work an example of a major problem he identifies in modern poetry citing Troilus and Cressida to illustrate his point:

This development [poetry that treats of the act of composition], where the mind curves back upon itself, may always be a limit, not only for poetry but for every kind of thought, for that "speculation" which Shakespeare says "Turns not to itself / Till it hath travell'd and is mirror'd there / Where it may see itself adding that, "This is not strange at all."

But if such a limit imposes itself, one's only recourse is to accept it and, in that acceptance, work toward the best possible understanding. Reality, then, as "hurled light" or "spattered egg" is at least a beginning; and from that point, Nemerov goes on to posit other developments, all of them offered tentatively and in the subjunctive mood—"if," "should." Once the illusion is projected, "splayed as a blaze / On the blank of limit," it becomes a potential source of knowledge, able to "entrance / The vacant stare, fix it with visions of, / However dripping and impure, an order." And if this can be achieved, "That is enough, or the abstract of enough." But the speaker of the poem, never content to accept a single vision of reality, pressing always for still another logical possibility in this investigation of the limits of knowledge, goes one step further:

And should the seed and food of order also
Resemble the things we see and know,
Lips, noses, eyes, the grimaces thereof
Compounded, playing in the fetal night,
That too is enough, if not too much.

"Human kind," says Eliot, "cannot bear very much reality"; and the reality of "lips, noses, eyes," recalling the torment of Othello, provides an instance of that truth even as it reminds us that the Moor's madness grows out of an illusion created by Iago.

The continuing movement in search of a ground for observation—which is both the poem's method and its meaning—culminates finally in a defense of art which may be described as Sidneyan:

This is an assertion, though admittedly an oblique and understated one. Any paraphrase of such a subtle argument runs the risk of Polonian specificity; but it is clear, I think, that Nemerov bases his defense of art on its moving power, on its ability to use a golden world—here a world of grand figures and actions with mythic resonance—to enhance and transform our vision of the world we experience. The instruments of that transformation are "effigies," of the sort described by Julia Bartholomay—in this poem primarily the cinema and images drawn from film technique and personalities but also the rich and violent world of mythology. In "Orphic Scenario," however, the effigies do not confirm a mistaken notion of reality; instead, they force an observer to question the grounds of his belief about reality and to become aware of the terrifying mysteries that great art is capable of communicating. This, finally, is the poem's testimony to the power of Shakespeare's drama. The death of Hamlet shows us

How all the buildings rise in a golden sky
Cheaper, and yet more golden, than before,
More high and solemn, borne on a great stage
In a failing light.

For Nemerov, then Hamlet offers a paradigm of the function of great art. In its majesty (and even in its theatrical "cheapness") it confronts us with the need to test our vision of reality. Its very grandeur is a source of its moving power, and though that grandness be at times specious, a publicist's excess—"The new Veronica, the stiffened face / Light of the world, cast on a hanging cloth"—it is capable nevertheless of driving us to other and deeper awarenesses.

Nemerov's response to the tyranny of Shakespeare appears finally in a variety of strategies, all of them based on the modern poet's recognition that Shakespeare is a vital presence both for himself and for his contemporary audience. In his poetry, Nemerov introduces and uses Shakespeare in a wide variety of ways ranging from casual, apparently flippant allusions to instances in which the original Shakespearean materials are deployed extensively to create whole poems. This habitual returning has its basis in two beliefs that Nemerov has set out in a quite explicit fashion—the first related to his understanding of poetry, the second to his sense of Shakespeare's thought. The struggle to come to terms with what is, the poet's continuing effort to define the relation between mind and things, observer and observed world, is the key to his description of poetry:

Poetry, I would say, is, in its highest ranges, no mere playing with the counters of meaning, but a perpetual rederiving of the possibility of meaning from matter, of the intelligible world from the brute recalcitrance of things.

It was Shakespeare's glory, "a sublime and terrible treasure which afterwards was lost," to have created his matchless dramas on the assumption that "there exist several distinct realms of being, which for all their apparent distinctness respond immediately and decisively to one another." In his continuing struggle as a poet, Nemerov has kept the example of Shakespeare before him, seizing upon occasional stray echoes of "The first age of the world" but recognizing his own less favored place in history. In "The Four Ages" the last age is described in a metaphor that recalls the poet's frequent denial that "All the world's a stage." Here the stage itself is dissolving and the show has come to an end:

The sentences break ranks, the orchestra
Has left the pit, the curtain has come down
Upon the smiling actors, and the crowd
Is moving toward the exits through the aisles.
Illusion at last is over.

This is a world Shakespeare never knew, a world of prose fit to explain but not to celebrate. In such an age, the tyranny of Shakespeare might seem especially inescapable and potent. But for Nemerov it becomes instead a spur to greater effort in the craft of writing, in the attempt "to find out what the nature of things has to say about what you think you have to say." In "the nature of things" Nemerov discovers that Hopkins knew: "there lives the dearest freshness." Shakespeare, as unattainable model, forces him to this discovery; and thus the tyrant Shakespeare becomes the guide and genius of his poetic achievement.