Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
*
Hello Friends —
Happy Bard Day! April 23 is celebrated as the supposed birthday of William Shakespeare. The Bard was born in 1564 and also supposedly died on the exact same day 52 years later, April 23, 1616. The monologue above is from Act V, scene 5 of Macbeth, when Macbeth learns of Lady Macbeth’s death. As with “Jabberwocky,” I strongly encourage you to read today’s selection out loud to someone else, at least once a year.
Ever wonder how Shakespeare was able to stay in perfect iambic pentameter so much of the time? Well, it certainly didn’t hurt that he made up many of the words he used — often taking a known word and twisting it into a new part of speech; noun into verb, verb into adjective, etc. — so that they just happen to fit perfectly into his syllabic structure. Here’s a fun list of words that have their earliest usage credited to Shakespeare in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Further reading: Of the dozens of literary works deriving their titles from this ironically immortal Macbeth passage, two particularly worth reading are “Out, Out —” by Robert Frost; and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (but not unless you’ve read something else by Faulkner first — As I Lay Dying is a good place to start if you’re a Faulkner virgin — otherwise, you’ll never get past the first sentence of The Sound and the Fury).
April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out my own eclectic selection of one poem per day for the duration of the month. If you wish to be unsubscribed from this Poem-a-Day email list at any time, please reply to this email with a friendly unsubscribe request (preferably in heroic couplet form). You may also request to add a consenting friend to the list, or even nominate a poem.
To learn more about National Poetry Month, or to subscribe to a more official-like Poem-a-Day list, visit www.poets.org.
Enjoy.
Ellen
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” by William Shakespeare was featured again for Poem-a-Day April 23, 2009.
Poems by William Shakespeare were also featured for Poem-a-Day April 23, 2008 and Poem-a-Day April 23, 2011.