SOURCE: "Prospero," in The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. XII, No. 1, 1983, pp. 1-25.

[In the essay below, Gooder argues against an optimistic reading of the character of Prospero, maintaining that while the protagonist of The Tempest does indeed represent the zenith of human achievement, he nevertheless is not portrayed as having arrived at wisdom.]

Students of The Tempest will know that there are two main lines of argument among critics who have written about the play. One is that The Tempest is 'Shakespeare's farewell to his art', and that in it he took a long backward glance over the characters, themes and subjects which he had dealt with in earlier plays, collected the most significantly recurrent of these—stripped of all impurities—and offered them to his audience as a kind of artistic confection containing all his essential meaning. The other is that The Tempest is a romance, a symbolic drama dealing in abstractions and archetypes concerning profound and universal meanings of life, and that it is not therefore susceptible to any crass, naturalistic demands we might make of it. There are many permutations of these arguments, and as often as not they are joined together, as for example, like this:

If Shakespeare thought of The Tempest as the last play he would write he may have said to himself … that he could afford to let action in it come to a kind of rest; that its task was not so much to tell a story as to fix a vision; that the symbols he hitherto had defined his art by concealing must now confess themselves, even obtrude themselves in measured dance and significant song …

Views of this kind are not easily denied, not least because The Tempest abounds in evidence that this is just the way that Shakespeare would like us to read the play. But I should like for a moment to put on one side these questions of significance and meaning and ask something entirely different. Does The Tempest give us, either as a whole or from scene to scene, really all that much to think about? For example, one of the best scenes in the play is that in Act II in which Antonio, playing upon certain susceptibilities in Sebastian, brings Sebastian round to the view that it would be wise and worthwhile for him to murder his brother, Alonso. Now this does, surely, refer to a familiar Shakespearean theme: that power of suggestion which is one of the resources of an evil nature. We think of course of Iago's influence upon Othello, or Lady Macbeth's upon her husband, so that this scene in The Tempest draws strength from our memory of previous plays. But, how much strength does it draw? Is it, perhaps, too much? Certainly Shakespeare, with great art and economy, has reminded us of that theme, but what has he left out? Is Antonio the summary of an idea, or an abstraction of it? To continue: at the end of the scene Sebastian, on the point of being convinced, asks Antonio:

But for your conscience.

To which Antonio replies:

Ay, sir; where lies that? if 'twere a kibe,
'Twould put me to my slipper …

and so on, and indeed the speech of Antonio's that follows is terrifying in its implications, for it is, as another critic said, the voice of naked power thinking. But there is also something missing in Antonio, a lack apparent at die beginning of this speech and made up nowhere else in the play. Antonio has no conscience, and not for any reason that is made clear in the play or in his character, but as it were by decree, or definition. He is like some character out of Webster, or Middleton, or Ford, any one of whom could have invented him. Compared with Lady Macbeth, Antonio has no inner life at all. Nor is he, if we think of Iago, even very subtle.

It is at this point in a discussion of The Tempest that the question of symbolism comes in. The point is, someone will say, that Antonio isn't supposed to have an inner life; he is a symbolic figure, a figure of romance, a romantic villain, as it were, whom it would be inappropriate to criticise on naturalistic grounds. That is no doubt just, but it brings us to another critical question: are we getting as much from romantic Shakespeare as we do from naturalistic Shakespeare? One of the ways we might answer is to return to the question of themes. The play of Othello does not show us, in Iago, the theme of evil influence, it shows us evil influence, the thing in itself. The play grips us because of the presence of the fact, not because of its significance. The Tempest is the one Shakespeare play where we commonly seek the significance before we have the fact. Thus, this excellently efficient little scene between Antonio and Sebastian is there to tell us something about a theme, whereas the theme tells us nothing about them, save that they are representatives of it. This is quite the reverse of Shakespeare's ordinary way of working. It is not, however, accidental. Not only is The Tempest a play in which there is very little action and a great deal of talking, but almost every event, from the opening storm onwards, is directly commented on so that we know how to take it. Moreover, we are told what to think of almost every major figure in the play. In The Tempest the hand of Shakespeare is scarcely ever out of the balance. In no other play does Shakespeare so blatantly seek our collaboration. I do not think, I might add, mat our failure to arrive at a commonly accepted interpretation of The Tempest is a contradiction of this view about the way Shakespeare was working. One critic wrote that 'The Tempest is whatever we would take it to be. Any set of symbols, moved close to this play, lights up as in an electric field.' Just so, but it does not necessarily follow that the meaning of The Tempest 'is precisely as rich as the human mind'. On the contrary, it may be that the meaning of The Tempest is comparatively thin, as we might discover if we make a point of coming to it empty handed, without any 'set of symbols'.

Let us begin by asking a simple, logical question: can A be true, if B, which is an important attribute of A, is not true? For example, can we say that Prospero is a triumph of humanity if, throughout the play, he appears to be extremely bad-tempered? And let, us, for the purposes of the exercise, stick to the play as we have it, and not seek excuses for why the play does not support our interpretation, rather than demonstrate that it does. Here is an example of what we might try to avoid. Professor Frank Kermode, in the learned introduction to his Arden edition of The Tempest, writes of the sources and analogues of the play and tells us that

Ultimately the source of The Tempest is an ancient motif, of almost universal occurrence, in saga, ballad, fairy tale and folk tale. The existence of this story accounts for the many analogues to The Tempest. That both Prospero and the father of Ayrer's Sidea are irascrible is, in the last analysis, explained by the fact that they descend from a bad-tempered giant-magician.

(Arden edition, 1954)

Now Kermode has said, not very long before, that Prospero 'exercises the supernatural powers of the holy adept. His Art,' he continues,

is here the disciplined exercise of virtuous knowledge, a 'translation of merit into power', the achievement of 'an intellect pure and conjoined with the powers of the gods …'

(Prof. Kermode is quoting R. H. West, The Invisible World, and Cornelius Agrippa, Occult Philosophy.)

For Kermode as for many other critics Prospero is at the very pinnacle of human consciousness and human possibility. It is obviously very awkward, therefore, that any groundling will notice that Prospero is bad-tempered, mean-spirited, highly vindictive, and perhaps more than a little neurotic. This 'irascibility' (to use his word) Ker-mode attributes to a 'bad-tempered giant-magician' in Shakespeare's sources, implying thereby that Shakespeare has but a feeble grasp on his material—an implication that Kermode didn't intend, but which might be worth keeping in mind.

Analysis of The Tempest has frequently proceeded on the assumption that the play generates a good deal of spiritual power, and the definition of Prospero as a 'magus' or a 'holy adept' is perfectly congruent with that assumption. But the main action of the play is less so: it issues from the mind of the 'magus' Prospero, it is divided into two parts, and both parts are very worldly. The first is Prospero's ambition to marry his daughter to the right sort of person; the second is his desire to be revenged upon his enemies. These things, which scarcely distinguish Prospero from the great mass of men, come to issue in Acts IV and V of the play, where we feel most uncomfortably the difference between what is happening in the play, and what Shakespeare wishes us to believe is happening. You will remember that in Act III we had Ferdinand engaged in a kind of symbolic abasement of himself, shifting logs. I say symbolic because I cannot see any practical end to Ferdinand's labours; Prospero appears to have no need of such a supply of fuel and has in any case a perfectly good labourer in Caliban. In any case, by Act IV, all of this is behind Ferdinand. He appears at the beginning of the scene, along with Prospero and Miranda, the arrangements for the betrothal having obviously been settled. Prospero warns the lovers against giving dalliance too much the rein, and so on, then calls up Ariel and demands a masque for the entertainment of the happy pair. This Prospero breaks up before it is finished, for he has suddenly remembered the conspiracy of Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo against his life. With the hurried explanation (which has become the most famous passage in the play) that he is vexed and troubled, Prospero descants upon life's insubstantialities—'we are such stuff as dreams are made on'—and sends the lovers off in order that he may speak privately to Ariel. Ariel explains that he has led the three buffoons, red-hot with drinking, through a gorse patch and into a stinking bog. Prospero expresses delight at these arrangements, packs Ariel off on another errand, mutters one or two execrations on the subject of Caliban ('a born devil on whose nature nurture can never stick') before turning invisible, the more conveniently to watch the carefully plotted discomfiture of Caliban and his companions. This is followed by the business in the line-grove in which Stephano and Trinculo, so enamoured of the stuffs that Ariel has hung out to tempt them, entirely forget their purpose, much to Caliban's dismay, and are driven off by spirits in the shape of hunting hounds. Prospero urges the spirits on, and concludes the act with the satisfied remark that 'At this hour/ Lies at my mercy all mine enemies …' We may say that in this Act the two main actions of the play, the bringing together of Ferdinand and Miranda, and the disabling of all Prospero's enemies, are completed.

A good deal of Act IV is taken up with the Masque, which I do not myself find very engaging—it is certainly inferior to good Jonsonian masque. But there are two scholarly problems connected with it. The more general and more important is the question of the kind of pleasure which we may assume a Jacobean audience took in a masque, and whether it isn't something which we can never hope to share. I mention this because there are critics who believe that we should think of the whole of The Tempest as a kind of dramatized masque. If so, it seems to me that our chance of getting as much pleasure from it as its original audience is limited from the outset. I don't mean we have lost the taste for spectacle which Inigo Jones's stage-sets and machinery encouraged in his seventeenth century contemporaries. But a stage play is a stage play, and Inigo himself could not have matched for spectacle what any man nowadays may seek from his television or the nearest wide-screen cinema. If Shakespeare's design was to amuse his audience with a play that had all the elements and atmosphere of a masque, much of its original interest must remain for us more or less academic. It has been suggested, moreover, that the masque in The Tempest is an interpolation, introduced by Shakespeare (or someone else) to make the play more suitable for some specific occasion. I am bound to say that this seems to me likely enough. The introduction of the masque is very clumsy, the reason given for its inclusion almost irrelevant:

    … for I must
Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple
Some vanity of mine Art: it is my promise,
And they expect it from me. (IV, 1, 40)

It hardly seems credible that Shakespeare would have exposed Prospero to the charge of being a low sideshow conjuror, on however grand a scale. Halfway through the masque are introduced a few lines which, though they have no point themselves, serve to underline the pointlessness of the whole spectacle. If they are not an interpolation by another hand, I think they are strong candidates for the worst lines in Shakespeare. Ferdinand says:

This is a most majestic vision, and
Harmonious charmingly: may I be bold
To think these spirits?

To which Prospero replies:

Spirits, which by mine art
I have from their confines call'd to enact
My present fancies. (IV, 1, 118)

Whereupon I think we must ask whether Prospero is exercising, in Prof. Kermode's phrase, the supernatural powers of the holy adept, whether the masque is the disciplined exercise of virtuous knowledge, or whether it isn't more in the nature of a tea-time cabaret? At any rate Ferdinand is impressed:

Let me live here ever;
So rare a wonder'd father, and a wise
Makes this place Paradise.

On the evidence of these lines I should have said that Miranda was in the presence of as ripe a pair of humbugs as Shakespeare could have imagined. Caliban at least had the merit of being true to his honest feelings.

We should not, probably, attach too much importance to the masque, for it is not indubitably Shakespeare's, and it certainly is a serious drag on our interest, which at this point in the play ought to be entirely committed. At the same time I wouldn't want to leave you with the impression that I was being flippant when I said a moment ago that I thought Miranda might well reconsider, in the light of what she hears in this act, the merits of Caliban. I am not forgetting that Caliban had tried to rape Miranda, and that is a grave mark against him; but I'd like to leave that aside for a moment, and ask what kind of thoughts Miranda might reasonably be having during the conversation between her fiancé and her father that she hears in Act IV? Certainly I think that anyone who finds Prospero a consistently impressive figure ought to explain what he thinks is going on during all that part of the act which precedes the masque. You will remember that it begins with Prospero's speech in which he accepts Ferdinand's suit for his daughter's hand.

If I have too austerely punish'd you,
Your compensation makes amends …
           All thy vexations
Were but trials of thy love, and thou
Hast strangely stood the test: here, afore Heaven,
I ratify this my rich gift. O Ferdinand,
Do not smile at me that I boast her off,
For thou shalt find she will outstrip all praise,
And make it halt behind her. (IV, 1, 1)

Now that is certainly as handsome a testimonial as any girl could hope to get from her father, and Miranda has good reason to be satisfied with the way things are going. Yet we might wonder, even if Miranda doesn't, just exactly what were the punishments, the trials and the vexations of which Prospero speaks. True, we have seen Ferdinand carrying numbers of logs about the stage, but it is hard to see that as a very dire punishment. During the entire length of that scene Ferdinand has had Miranda on hand to chat with; he doesn't give any outward signs of suffering, though we take the point that this young prince is being symbolically abased to the level of Caliban, and it is indeed his principal complaint that he was destined for better things. Yet inconvenience, or chagrin, are not the same as suffering, and Shakespeare seems to be telling us in Prospero's speech how to take the log-carrying scene, telling us, that is, what he has not adequately shown.

I don't know that I have an argument with which to oppose those who will say that our imaginations will and should connive with Shakespeare's purposes. So I can only ask (as though you were coming to the play for the first time) whether you can see anything here that looks like suffering, or whether as a reader of the play you can find anything in the language of Ferdinand at this point that seems to issue from anguish or misery. I put an emphasis on suffering because it seems to me that if we can't believe that Ferdinand is really in despair at the progress of events, then we cannot believe that he has undergone a trial. It wouldn't be hard to show that Shakespeare can show us many varieties of mental anguish, and I ask you to consider whether there isn't more evidence of a lover's torment in A Midsummer Night's Dream? But if you think that on this question I have confined my imagination into a cloven pine, you will be especially exasperated with my next quibble. 'All the vexations were but my trials of thy love,' Prospero says to Ferdinand. But I would like to be so prosaic as to ask in what way—even assuming that we are convinced that Ferdinand has really suffered a trial—carrying logs is a trial of love, or what kind of love it is a trial of? 'You must be wise, you must be good, And help your wife to chop the wood', is the last couplet of a nursery rhyme children sing. But it is clear that Prospero hasn't in mind any such bourgeois notion as whether Ferdinand is likely to make an adequate père de famille. The nursery rhyme, however, offers us two words that Shakespeare does not, 'wise' and 'good'. Can we say that wisdom and goodness are in evidence among Ferdinand's eligible qualities? In fact, as far as Ferdinand is concerned, Prospero has but one overt piece of evidence to go on, and that is that he is very strongly attracted to Miranda. That no doubt is an admirable thing in Ferdinand, but also it is something he shares with Caliban. What I cannot help wondering about at this point, is the difference, in Prospero's mind, and in ours, between Caliban and Ferdinand. What Caliban's qualities are—and they are surely considerable—we know, and so does Prospero; what Ferdinand's are we as yet do not, or at least not much. So I wonder, when I am thinking about which man would be the more suitable partner for the exquisite Miranda, whether Shakespeare (and Prospero) wasn't depending very heavily upon certain prejudices which would make us feel that Prospero was making a judicial fatherly selection between these two aspirants. For Caliban, of course, is an ugly, hairy, ill-mannered, smelly, foul-mouthed savage; whereas Ferdinand is hand-some, elegant and fair-spoken, and though he has but lately suffered shipwreck, has, like a movie star, survived with hair unruffled and clothes undrenched. Now I am not suggesting that we could expect Shakespeare, or Prospero, or any man who has a daughter, to make, in equivalent circumstances, a choice different from that which Prospero makes. Yet, in The Merchant of Venice and in Othello, where Shakespeare finds himself dealing with situations wherein powerful prejudices operate, we find him asking, perhaps in spite of himself, radical questions, by which I mean humane questions, even if in some of his conclusions he is more conventional. So I think we might ask whether his failure to confront this romantic situation in The Tempest in a radical spirit, and indeed his willingness to use his audience's most conventional prejudices, is not indicative of a change of interest which is also a slackening of imagination. I think that in this case Shakespeare is not letting us see, as he very much does let us see in The Merchant of Venice and Othello, what our feelings are made of and what determines our choices, even in the most serious matters. In The Tempest all of that is carefully hidden. The American comedian Lenny Bruce brought it out, in one of his California nightclub turns:

Now, here is a good summation on the cliché 'Would You Want One of Them to Marry Your Sister?' Yeah. I would like to do this even though it's no tour de force to do integration in Los Angeles—because we assume you are integrationists … So I say, where can I really do it where it'll count? Mobile, Alabama …

Then, I wanna do it for the Ku Klux Klan—and I am being objective—the Ku Klux Klan …

O.K. So now I wanna tell him, 'I'll leave the sister aspect, I'll get closer to home. You are a white, the Imperial Wizard, a man forty years old, and now you have a choice—and if you don't think this is logic you can burn me on the fiery cross. This is the logic: you have the choice of spending fifteen years married to a woman—a black woman or a white woman. Fifteen years kissing and hugging and sleeping real close on hot nights, watching her take off her garter belt, taking her makeup off, seeing every facet of her—fifteen years—with a black black woman, or fifteen years with a white white woman. And these two women are about the same age bracket, so it's not an unfair comparison. Fifteen years with a black woman or fifteen years with a white woman.

The white woman is Kate Smith … and the black woman is Lena Home!

So you're not concerned with black or white any more, are you? You are concerned with how cute, how pretty. And if you are concerned with how cute or how pretty, then let's really get basic and persecute ugly people. Not black or white, cause you see, it's a façade, man.

And now, as far as your sister is concerned, you can assume that your sister, boy, when she searches her soul, she will jump over fifty Charles Laughtons to get next to one Harry Belafonte … (Essential Lenny Bruce)

Could we, at this point in the play, put our hands on our hearts and say that we concur in Prospero's judgment for any other reason than that Caliban is ugly? Or to put it another way, if we had Caliban's verse and Ferdinand's verse laid out side by side, with neither names nor extraneous remarks subjoined, which man would we prefer?

The argument that I am depending upon realistic considerations inappropriate to The Tempest is likely to go as follows. Clearly The Tempest is a romance, and however we define the conventions of the genre it is perfectly obvious that Caliban is a baddie, related to Silenus before and Comus after (we need not be surprised, therefore, that he speaks such marvellous verse), and that Ferdinand is a goodie, related to Prince Charming and Tamino. Moreover, it is obviously quite unapt to question the propriety of the 'test', since as you yourself said a moment ago Prospero isn't interested in any questions of bourgeois homemaking.

Now we cannot ignore this person, however much we may think that that argument begs the question, for it also comes close in to the heart of the matter. For if we do not settle the question of how we are to take the play, we clearly cannot begin to erect an interpretation of any solidity. If we take the play to be a romance, and the atmosphere and the action and the characters to have a heightened symbolic force we do not accord the elements of a realistic or naturalistic play, how are we to take Prospero's next speech?

Then, as my gift … take my daughter: but
If thou dost break her virgin-knot before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minister'd,
No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-ey'd disdain and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both: therefore take heed,
As Hymen's lamps shall light you. (IV, 1, 13)

Where we get language of that kind in romance it tends to be said either to the wicked witch, or by the wicked witch, and not by the presiding genius of the story to the young lovers. A romance ordinarily ends with the lovers living happily ever after, but the conventions wouldn't preclude Shakespeare's at least suggesting the possibility of the opposite result. Yet we must see that Prospero's language becomes very specific. If he was not, in what has gone before, in the least bit concerned to discover Ferdinand's ability to create domestic harmony, he is here very anxious to remind Ferdinand, and us, of the possibility of domestic discord. So I don't think we can say that the conventions of the genre relieve Shakespeare of the necessity of giving us any reality in the one instance, while it allows him to ram reality down our throats in the other. For surely, what takes our attention in this speech is not any question of romantic archetypes and symbolic curses, but rather the question of what is going on in Prospero's mind. For his language here is at once over-bearing and discordant. Consider, for example, Prospero's phrase 'if thou dost break her virgin-knot …' which the Arden editor suggests (but does not say) is a translation from the Latin 'soluere zonam', which it is not—I doubt Shakespeare's Latin was as inaccurate as that. Kermode also refers us to Pericles where Marina, imprisoned in a brothel, says:

If fires be hot, knives sharp, or waters deep,
Untied I still my virgin knot will keep.
                                               (IV, 2, 146)

But there is a great difference between Marina's untie; and Prospero's break: had Prospero said untie we could have excused him this speech, for untying suggests a certain intricacy and a certain delicacy, which we are to believe that Ferdinand has by nature. However, break her virgin-knot is a euphemism for rape, and if Prospero believes Ferdinand capable of rape he is mentally setting him, far more than he did in the log-carrying business, at the level of Caliban. (Ferdinand doesn't notice, though.) What follows are those few lines about the probable results of what used to be called premarital intercourse.

No sweet aspersions shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-ey'd disdain and discord shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly
That you shall hate it both …

How are we, who cannot accept the categorical truth of that proposition, to take Prospero's words? Should we, for example, think of Prospero as uttering a curse? He is a wizard, the limitation of whose powers is not made clear in the play, so we can imagine that he could damn his daughter's marriage, if he wanted to. But he does not actually say, 'I will bring it about … ', nor does he say, 'let there fall no sweet aspersions' and so on. He offers a fact, dependent upon a causal relationship, if you do this, then that will be the result, so we must wonder whether Prospero believes it, and after that whether Shakespeare believes it, for the language forces us to feel that Prospero is not pointing out a risk, but promising a certainty. To find Prospero tolerable at this point, we must believe in what he says, or believe that he has reason for saying it, and we must, therefore, believe that Shakespeare's authority is behind him. (So at this point it might be very helpful to know a little more about Ann Hathaway.) So I cannot answer the question: I do not know whether Prospero is cursing Ferdinand or warning him; all that is plain to me is that his words have an arresting intensity.

We might at this point step outside The Tempest and consider briefly a more general question. I take it that when T. S. Eliot, in his famous essay on the metaphysical poets, spoke of a dissociation of sensibility, a dissociation, that is, of the physical from the mental consciousness, one of the things he had in mind was a sense of the change in the way that people thought about sexuality. Shakespeare lived in an age of intense sexual awareness, an age, toward the latter part of his life, evidently half-crazed with thinking on virginity. The marks of that consciousness are to be found in nearly every Jacobean dramatist. Some of them, like Webster, Middleton, and Ford, endlessly irritated that consciousness by throwing up lurid images of lust, infidelity, violation, and incest, while others, like Beaumont and Fletcher, tickled it for a little prurient amusement. But there's no reality in any of this because fundamentally all of these dramatists, however remarkable their skills, were unwilling to confront what it really was, in themselves and in their age, that they were pretending to write about. In all of them there is incident and rhetoric of great force, but no steady presentation of what, at bottom, is troubling them. It is only Shakespeare who can give us men who are not distorted into monsters, but are truly on the rack—Hamlet, Angelo, Othello, Prospero.

I feel then, that this speech of Prospero's gives us a strong reason to believe that there is something working in Prospero's mind that is incommensurate with the 'disciplined exercise of virtuous knowledge', or 'intellect pure and conjoined with the powers of the gods', and which cannot be explained away by defining The Tempest as a romance. Some corroboration comes a moment later. Prospero, we must imagine, turns away from Ferdinand and Miranda to address those words to Ariel wherein he directs the spirit to conjure up a masque. Prospero then turns back to Ferdinand and Miranda, who, we imagine, have during this very short space of time joined hands and exchanged meaningful, we might even say amorous, looks. Under the circumstances they could hardly be expected to do less; indeed, Prospero, not to say Miranda, might well have wondered had Ferdinand not at this point expressed some warmth of feeling. Yet Prospero's words are severe to the point of being minatory:

Look thou be true; do not give dalliance
Too much the rein: the strongest oaths are straw
To th' fire in' the' blood: be more abstemious,
Or else, good night your vow! (IV, 1,51)

At this point I think we might ask a slightly different question—what are we to think of Prospero's manners? Or, to put it more concretely, by what right does a father presume to speak to his prospective son-in-law in these terms? Or, why did he not at least choose a time when Miranda was not at hand? But, given the situation, we may say that here, if anywhere, is the real test of Ferdinand. He needs here a speech of extraordinary delicacy and force, one which will express his love for Miranda, assure Prospero of the honour of his intentions, and place the unbuttoned pre-occupations of Prospero's puritan psychology, a speech, in short, which will justify his election. What does he say?

          I warrant you, sir;
The white cold virgin snow upon my heart
Abates the ardour of my liver. (IV, 1, 53)

The Arden editor has a worried footnote about this speech, nor does he fail to remind us that the liver was thought to be the seat of emotions. But I cannot construct any interpretation on these lines which does not lead to the conclusion that Ferdinand is a cold fish. The Tempest, as a play, very badly needs someone who can resist and place what we are given as the character of Prospero, and there are many reasons why Ferdinand should have filled that róle. But at this crucial moment Ferdinand sounds as hollow as a drum. I don't see how Miranda can bear him.

But it would be fair to consider what it was that Shakespeare was trying to do with Ferdinand and Miranda. Do we not, indeed, must we not believe that in Miranda Shakespeare is offering us a girl who would answer to Marvell's invocation to his mistress?

Now therefore, while the youthful hew
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing Soul transpires
At every pore with instant Fires.…

We must, that is, think of her as chaste and innocent and obedient to her parent, at the same time that she is in the first bloom of sexual maturity and perfectly ready for life. A description is clumsy, but what we are to expect here is a young woman who shares affinities with Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, Marina, and Perdita. For those who believe that The Tempest is an epitome of major Shakespearean themes Miranda must somehow condense and recapitulate these predecessors. But I think we might note how very wanly, in fact, Miranda reflects them, so that she is not so much an epitome as an abstraction. We may let that pass, however, and continue to honour, for a moment, the apparent intention of Shakespeare.

The masculine equivalent of Miranda seems, really, to present a greater difficulty, not only for Shakespeare, but for other dramatists as well. What is needed is a young man who has had a certain amount of experience, enough, that is to say, to help him recognise the particular value of Miranda, and to bear towards her a delicacy of spirit unknown to a youth who is completely callow. He is, that is to say, to be a young man, and not a youth. And yet this experience should not in any way have sullied the nobility of his spirit and character. That this is what Shakespeare is after we are more or less told in Act III; whether he gets it or not is another matter. His young man must have in some measure those qualities which Aristotle described as characteristic of a Young Man.

Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show absence of self-control. They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while they last, but quickly over: their impulses are keen but not deep-rooted, and are like sick people's attacks of hunger and thirst. They are hot-tempered and quick-tempered, and apt to give way to their anger; bad temper often gets the better of them, for owing to their love of honour they cannot bear being slighted, and are indignant if they imagine themselves unfairly treated. While they love honour, they love victory still more; for youth is eager for superiority over others, and victory is one form of this. They love both more than they love money, which indeed they love very little, not having yet learnt what it means to be without it … They look at the good side rather than the bad, not yet having witnessed many instances of wickedness. They trust others readily, because they have not yet often been cheated. They are sanguine; nature warms their blood as though with excess of wine; and besides that, they have as yet met with few disappointments. Their lives are mainly spent not in memory but in expectation; for expectation refers to the future, memory to the past, and youth has a long future before it and a short past behind it … They are easily cheated, owing to the sanguine disposition just mentioned. Their hot tempers and hopeful dispositions make them more courageous than older men are; the hot temper prevents fear, and the hopeful disposition creates confidence; we cannot feel fear so long as we are feeling angry, and any expectation of good makes us confident. They are shy, accepting the rules of society in which they have been trained, and not yet believing in any other standard of honour. They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things—and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning; and whereas reasoning leads us to choose what is useful, moral goodness leads us to choose what is noble. They are fonder of their friends, intimates, and companions than older men are, because they like spending their days in the company of others, and have not yet come to value either their friends or anything else by their usefulness to themselves. All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They disobey Chilon's precept by overdoing everything; they love too much and hate too much, and the same with everything else. They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it; this, in fact, is why they overdo everything. If they do wrong to others, it is because they mean to insult them, not to do them actual harm. They are ready to pity others, because they think everyone an honest man, or anyhow better than he is: they judge their neighbours by their own harmless natures, and so cannot think he deserves to be treated in that way. They are fond of fun and therefore witty, wit being well-bred insolence.

(Rhetorica, 1389^a)

(That strikes me, by the way, as true wisdom, of a kind which Prospero, whether he is a holy adept or not, hasn't the least inkling of. Indeed, as far as wisdom is concerned, Aristotle is humane and alive, whereas our holy adept is a museum piece to be displayed among the manuals of sorcery and the instruments of alchemy.) To catch, sur le vif, a young man such as would conform to Aristotle's definition is evidently a matter of nice delicacy. We have, I mean, very few created examples. Usually, a fictional young man is either too weak to sustain our interest or even our belief in him, like Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing, or Tamino in Mozart's Magic Flute; or else he has an interest of altogether the wrong kind, like Hamlet, or Vanderbank in The Awkward Age. I should like to postulate the theory that there comes a time in a writer's life after which he can no longer sympathetically 'get inside' such a young man. Either he shuts himself off from the real complexities of the case and gives us a character who is hollow, like Claudio; or else he engages with the complexities but brings to them thoughts and imaginings which are the product of a more mature introspection, and creates a Hamlet. The postulate is in a measure supported by the fact that at the age of about thirty—the perfect age for such sympathy, perhaps—Shakespeare created the most famous pair of young lovers in the language, and his one real success in this vein, Romeo and Juliet. It is remarkable how much of Aristotle's characterization is in Romeo, Mercutio, Tybalt, and yet all seen with the inward sympathy of a man who believed in, and was not afraid of, the real humanness of youth. It is by comparison with Romeo and Juliet that you realize how little you get in Ferdinand and Miranda, and how thoroughly that relationship is palled over by late middle age, and a state of mind which cannot sympathise with, or trust, what should really be there between lovers.

The trouble with The Tempest in respect of this very important relationship is that Shakespeare does not create it, and Prospero does not trust it. Suppose that my postulate is true, and that Shakespeare could only in part have created that relationship because he was too old to be inward with Ferdinand: need The Tempest have foundered on this fact? Not necessarily, and it is possible that up to now I have been overdoing Ferdinand and Miranda. If they remain inadequate, they are still not at the centre of their play, as Romeo and Juliet are. Our real interest is in Prospero, so that our interest in Ferdinand and Miranda extends no further than the point where they help to determine our understanding of Prospero. Or to put it another way, they have no independent existence; they are only in the play for Prospero's use. Whether this ought to be the case is another question, but given that it is, what might have satisfied us that Prospero is really as wise as Shakespeare wants us to believe? It is a risky business to second-guess Shakespeare, but I wonder whether we mightn't have felt it a far better test of Ferdinand if, instead of making Ferdinand carry logs which he does not need, Prospero had left Ferdinand and Miranda alone together in his cell for long enough so that we could see the difference between Ferdinand's approach to Miranda and Caliban's, between lust and love, between animal desire and a belief in the sanctity of the marriage union. But more important, we should see that Prospero, without necessarily sympathising with Ferdinand, has, like Aristotle, or Mozart's Don Alfonso in CosÌ Fan Tutte, wisdom sufficient to recognise what Ferdinand is. What we see now in Prospero as tyrannical power, would come nearer to being the real power that flows from confidence in human nature and a belief in oneself. Finally, we should have, instead of Prospero's testy, prurient and ugly injunctions, something that made more in the direction of those lines of Yeats's:

How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?

Now, save for that famous Shakespearean set-piece which comes just after the masque—'Our revels now are ended …' and so on—about which I can find very little to say, the remainder of Act IV is concentrated upon the gulling of Caliban and his two sottish and obtuse companions. This scene, or rather this part of the act following the masque, seems to me one of the best in the play. Not, I mean, in the way that Shakespeare is at his best in the great tragedies, where a complex situation is brought to dramatic finish, but rather in the way which is, I take it, more appropriate to this play. The scene, that is, is a sketch which makes very clear the relationships between certain characters, and certain ideas. It is a sketch which tell us where we are—or should do, for the trouble is that I'm not at all sure that it tells us what Shakespeare intended. For I think the question we have to ask here is why, when Caliban, about whom all through the play we have been told the most unflattering things, is intent upon a vicious and deceitful murder as bad as that contemplated by Antonio and Sebastian earlier in the play, and when Prospero is merely taking action to defend himself, all our sympathies go out to Caliban, less than none to Prospero? Surely one of the things in play here is our uncertainty about the extent of Caliban's independence, and our uncertainty about the limitations of Prospero's power. It is true that of all the characters in the play Prospero's power over Caliban is most tenuous, as it is true that Caliban has more autonomy than anyone but Prospero. Yet it is clear that the match is unequal. Prospero has in his employ a spy far more expert than any mere George Smiley. Caliban's plans are known at headquarters almost before he has uttered them, his procedure is gulled and guyed by subtle traps and the dissemination of misinformation. At no point is Caliban in a position to knock a nail into Prospero's head (which sounds horrid enough), because in the first place Prospero isn't there in his cave, and even if he were, Ariel would certainly see that the conspirators were drubbed in another bog. Now, as said, we don't know the limitations of Prospero's power. Ker-mode is interesting on this subject in his introduction, and it is perhaps true that we lack the information which an ordinary Jacobean audience would have brought to the play, and which would have told them exactly at what point in the hierarchy of Thrones, Dominations, Prince-doms, Virtues and Powers Prospero, Ariel and the rest stood. It is not dramatically clear, however. I think we are on the whole to believe that Prospero's power is limited in some directions, and that it depends upon an assiduous application and concentration. Yet it appears that Prospero can raise a tempest, can raise a masque, and can, in his own words (Act V), dim the noontide sun, stir up earthquakes, and wake the dead. That is to say, at a push Prospero could give God a good fight. This is, of course, something of a characteristic of romance—we are always wondering why if ogres and witches can do one thing they can't do another—and we ought not perhaps to abuse Shakespeare for taking advantages of its vagaries. But the important point is this: I don't believe that anyone has ever believed, from first to last, that when Prospero breaks up the masque with the words

I had forgot that foul conspiracy
Of the beast Caliban and his confederates
Against my life: the minute of their plot
Is almost come …

that his life is in fact in the slightest danger. Everyone knows that Caliban is unequal to the contest, and our whole interest in the scene is in witnessing how he will be made to suffer. I would have said it was a kind of bear-baiting.

You remember what happens: Caliban comes sneaking in with his confederates Stephano and Trinculo. Unfortunately for him, Ariel has put up, I take it, a kind of clothes-line hung with—in Shakespeare's stage-direction—'glistering apparel, etc.'. Stephano and Trinculo are so attracted by this 'frippery stuff that they almost completely forget their purpose, much to the increasing dismay of Caliban, who is in an agony of anticipation at the prospect of levelling the score with Prospero, and at the same time terrified at the consequences should his scheme be interrupted. Just at the very point at which Caliban despairs and realises what a hopeless case he is in, Prospero and Ariel come on. This is Shakespeare's stage direction:

A noise of hunters heard. Enter divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds, hunting them about; PROSPERO and ARIEL setting them on.

What, it seems to me, is striking about this scene is that we cannot help all our sympathies going out to Caliban, who is on the rack between the inane mindlessness of his allies and the relentless and uncharitable power of his enemies. The scene gives us Caliban's sinking heart, his quickening fear, and his dawning realization of the peril in which he stands. At the moment, at the precise moment when Caliban realises that all hope is gone, Prospero—it must have been delicious for him—looses his dogs. Now it seems to me that if we think of this as a funny or amusing scene, and worse, if we think that Prospero's action is 'the disciplined exercise of virtuous knowledge', or the work of an intellect 'pure and conjoined with the powers of the gods', then we are on the way to being as sadistic as Prospero.

You may think that sadistic is too strong a word. These are Prospero's words to Ariel, after he has set on his dogs:

Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions; shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps; and more pinch-spotted make
  them
Than pard or cat o' mountain.
                                  (IV, 1, 258)

To which Ariel replies:

Hark, they roar!

And now, may I remind you of those words concerning Caliban that Prospero spoke in soliloquy earlier in the Act:

A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;
And as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers. I will plague them all,
Even to roaring.
                                     (IV, 1, 188)

Would we, if Prospero were talking not about Caliban, but about some miserable beast next-door at the Bear Garden, or some recalcitrant cart-horse, think that his words revealed a superior human fineness, or even the lowest common denominator of human feeling?

And as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers …

Do not those words rebound upon the speaker?

It is important to say something now about the Fifth Act of the play, for I can think of at least three things connected with it which make against what I have been saying.

1. That the last Act is extremely efficient. Prospero appears relaxed and in control; the play moves definitely and purposefully to a conclusion; both Prospero and Shakespeare appear to be free of any anxieties about the plot, such as I have been worrying myself over.
2. Prospero speaks some of his best verse in the last act. His language is free of the awkward verbosity of his early scene with Miranda, and of the intemperate quality that it has in Act IV. It is in Act V relaxed, confident, and in places very lovely.
3. Should we not therefore conclude, from these two facts, that there is in the play a dramatic curve, intended by Shakespeare, which I have not acknowledged, but which takes into account, and explains, all that I have been saying about Act IV? I mean, did not Shakespeare intend Prospero at the beginning of the play to seem awkward and uncertain of his power, to go through a period of doubt and increasing strain as he juggles with his various plans, like a magician intensely concentrating upon doing three or four tricks at once? Did he not intend that this development should come to a head at the end of Act IV with those lines—which do come as something of a deep sigh—

          At this hour
Lies at my mercy all mine enemies … ?

The thought, indeed, is 'recapped' and more carefully elaborated in the first lines of Act V—

Now does my project gather to a head:
My charms crack not; my spirits obey; and time
Goes upright with his carriage …—

which prepare the way for an act in which Prospero, having pulled off his great trick, can now relax, with himself and everyone else, can afford to be a little more expansive and generous, and can efficiently tidy up in the comforting knowledge that he has won through, and that nothing can now threaten his plans or himself.

This is a very attractive interpretation, and it seems to me very possible that Shakespeare had in mind something of the kind. But on the other hand, I certainly do not get any strong sense of the inevitability of looking at The Tempest in this way. I mean, it does not immediately seem to fit all the facts and make sense of them, and parts of the foundation (to change the metaphor) upon which such an interpretation is built seem to me a little crumbly. So I would like to examine these three points, which seem to make against my sense of the play, a little more closely.

In the first place, if we accept such an interpretation as this, we must also accept that practically the entire weight of The Tempest is carried by Prospero. No other character can be allowed independent existence or independent development, except insofar as he contributes to our understanding of Prospero. Thus there can be no drama as such: there is no conflict because Prospero confronts no one remotely his equal, in narrative importance, in dramatic power, or imaginative autonomy.

The one real drama in The Tempest, then, takes place entirely within the person and character of Prospero: the play is about his struggle with himself. Certainly, with the exception of Caliban, to whom I shall return in a moment, no character in The Tempest remotely competes with Prospero for our attention, and if we cannot find the play in him, we cannot find it at all.

But at the same time we must realize that if we are going to have not a conventional drama of human conflict, but a drama of character, as it were a psychological drama, then the character of Prospero must be not only rich and significant, but also available to our understanding. We must be given a lot to work on. Now let us say, for the sake of the argument, that we really have been given, in the earlier parts of the play, the steps in Prospero's struggle toward self-knowledge and self-fulfillment. That we have been given, I mean, very convincingly, a Prospero in the Act I who is awkward, ill-at-ease, and uncertain of his power, either over himself or over others, and later on a clear development to a Prospero who is intensely excited and pre-occupied with his plans, and therefore, of course, very irritable and pre-occupied, or to use Kermode's word, 'irascible'. It is in some such way that we might explain, or explain away, such things as Prospero's bad verse in Act I, his ill-mannered treatment of Ferdinand, and his savage attitude to Caliban in Act IV. What we would need to be given at the end of the play is something in the nature of a revelation, the image of a mind coming to know itself. Something, that is to say, as good as the soliloquies of Macbeth. Of course everything will depend upon Prospero's verse, and so we have now to ask, is Prospero's verse in Act V really as good as that? There is no space to analyse it all, but I think, if we laid it all out in a continuous speech, the first thing we'd notice would be how very much of it is competent plot summary. There is no other play of Shakespeare's in which we are told so much and shown so little, and a great deal of the telling is done by Prospero, awkwardly at the beginning with Miranda, rather more fluently at the end with all his victims around him.

                          Most cruelly
Didst thou, Alonso, use me and my daughter:
Thy brother was a furtherer in the act.
Thou art pinch'd for't now, Sebastian. Flesh and

  blood,
You, brother mine, that entertain'd ambition,
Expell'd remorse and nature; whom, with
  Sebastian,—
Whose inward pinches therefore are most
  strong,—
Would here have kill'd your King; I do forgive
  thee,
Unnatural though thou art.
                                            (V, 1, 71)

The great part of Prospero's verse in Act V is of that kind: reminding us what has happened, and telling us how to take it. So we do get a strong feeling of a Prospero efficiently winding up the play. He is so good at it that we hardly notice that he's winding up a play which we haven't seen.

Of course some of the verse is a great deal better than this. In the speech from which I have just read, for example, we find—

            Their understanding
Begins to swell; and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore,
That now lies foul and muddy …

or just a bit earlier—

            The charm dissolves apace;
And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason …

I would not for a moment want to deny that that is lovely and moving verse. At the same time I think we should notice that it is descriptive verse, and of Prospero it tells us no more than that he is a sensitive observer of a moment of wakening. And so, may I remind you, is Shakespeare. Images of waking and sleeping, of sunrise and sunset, in short images of light and darkness are one of Shakespeare's most reliable strengths. I should imagine that if anyone rolled off his tongue the first six Shakespearean periods that came to his mind, at least half would include images of this kind:

But look, the morn in russet mantle clad
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill …

    —Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to the'rooky wood …

But soft! What light through yonder window
  breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with any of this. Indeed, Shakespeare has more than any other writer taught us what subtle effects changes in light can work upon our emotional states. At the same time, Shakespeare never seems to have any trouble with verses of this kind. I don't mean that here Shakespeare is just turning it on, but I do mean that we need not suppose that images of this kind necessarily indicate Shakespeare is concentrating all his imagination to tell us something. So, on the face of it at least, I don't think that the superior dramatic organisation, and the superior verse of the last Act, are sufficient to support a belief that the whole play comes to rest on them.

Fortunately there is a place in the last Act where we can test directly and adequately the hypothesis that Prospero undergoes a spiritual development through the course of The Tempest. Near the beginning Ariel gives Prospero a brief account of what he has done with Alonso and his courtiers, which ends with these words about Gonzalo and the others:

His tears run downs his beard, like winter's
  drops
From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly
  works 'em,
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender. (V, 1, 16)

To which Prospero replies, almost surprised:

Dost thou think so, spirit?

Ariel's next line is loaded:

Mine would sir, were I human.

To which Prospero replies:

And mine shall.

Now it is clear that something has happened to Prospero here. In the first place Shakespeare does not usually drop a word like 'human' lightly. We are, I think, to believe that Prospero is taking just that final difficult step which makes meaningful all that he has done so far, and which is, nevertheless, a revelation, a leap of imagination whereby Prospero discovers at once what it is to be human, and where his real human power lies. Prospero's speech that follows must give us this inward discovery. This is what Prospero says:

             And mine shall.
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply
Passion as they, be kindlier mov'd than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to
  th' quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further … (V, 1, 20)

I do not find it easy to read this speech with the seriousness which it asks for. 'They being penitent, the sole drift of my purpose doth extend not a frown further …'—have we come so far for so little? Do we feel that those lines summarise a high spiritual purpose, or are they more like the sentiments of a school bully: 'Say you're sorry, and I'll stop twisting your arm'? And in the three-and-a-half lines to which the Arden editor devotes such a lot of attention—

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to
  th' quick,
Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance …—

do we really feel in the grip of a new spiritual and moral revelation? Or do we feel that Shakespeare is asking us to take as serious what is really only sententious?

At the end of The Tempest Prospero is obliged to separate Caliban, and all that Caliban represents, from himself ('This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.'). Kermode is surely right to argue that in the play Shakespeare brings into conflict nature and art, and we should no doubt all agree that in Caliban nature is represented very thoroughly. Caliban, too, is an abstraction, like all the other characters in the play save Prospero; but unlike most of them he really does seem more than an efficient epitome of his ancestors, Launce and Bottom, Falstaff, Sir Toby, and Autolycus. He really is something new, and perhaps Shakespeare's greatest reward for presenting his material in this abstract way. What is curious is Shakespeare's determination that we should regard Caliban as a spiritual inferior. (Papageno is supposed to be the spiritual inferior of Tamino and Pamina, but it was the birdcatcher's song that Mozart, on his death-bed, could not get out of his mind.) But would anyone think of Caliban as spiritually inferior, if we did not have Prospero and Miranda constantly telling us that he was so? And how far did Shakespeare (who may, no doubt, by this time in his career have wished well enough to sit upon a golden bough and sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what was past, or passing or to come) really believe that a force such as that represented by Caliban could be suppressed, on the mere say-so of a testy old man and a pair of callow lovers?

Shakespeare, like all his contemporaries, was interested in voyages of discovery, and we may assume that his interest was not only in scenery and vegetation—though he was certainly interested in that—but in certain moral problems and possibilities as well. I would not argue that The Tempest is Shakespeare's American play, that it is concerned with the colonial experience or any part of it, or that it was in any way prophetic. At the same time it is impossible to suppose that there was not in Shakespeare's mind an interest in the question of what would happen if you put a lot of highly civilised Europeans upon a desert island and bring them into contact with an uncivilised native. If The Tempest is not about a confrontation of this sort, it is certainly about nature, nature as represented by Caliban, and nature as seen by a group of variously civilised Europeans. One of the nicest scenes in the play is that in Act II in which Gonzalo and Adrian describe what they see before them on the Island, while Antonio and Sebastian contradict them in discordant counterpoint. This indicates, in abstract, the opposition in the play between what is natural and what is unnatural, between Caliban, for example, and Stephano, Trinculo, Sebastian and Antonio. Obviously Caliban, as chief representative—one might say almost creator—of this natural world, is, and is meant to be, preferable to them. But there is another, and more important, contrast in the play than this between what is natural and what is unnatural, and that is the one between what is natural, and what is civilised. This is another subject that The Tempest shares with A Midsummer Night's Dream, where we are made comically aware that the rule of law which governs Athens is not so much a threat to human aspirations as is the caprice of nature which prevails in the woods beyond. Similarly, in The Tempest, we are intended to endorse Prospero's preference for Ferdinand, for Europe, and for 'all sanctimonious ceremonies', over Caliban, his Island, and the instant gratification of libido. But by the time he came to write The Tempest Shakespeare's faith in civilisation was not so uncomplicated as it had been when it was administered by Duke Theseus and tempered by the good graces of his Hippolyta; whereas all that associates with nature in this play still fairly teems! In this world Prospero seems an anachronism—this is no country for old men! He remains occupied, pre-occupied, with the past, with the future, and with consequences, and his attempts to understand and control nature seem sometimes ambiguous, and always neurotic, as though, in order to get any grip at all, he had to rule out, for himself and for others, wide areas of human nature. Kermode is surely right to argue that Shakespeare intended The Tempest for a romance whose protagonist is at the very pinnacle of human consciousness and human achievement. But I do not believe that Shakespeare really convinces us that Prospero arrives at wisdom, and if we connive at his intention we lose a better play than the one he hoped he was writing. And we lose, moreover, this last great character, Prospero, this disappointed old man by whose inability to tell us anything that matters we are told so much.

It was not … what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked
  forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes …