Page 207
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
"Shakespeare" addresses tragedy as a matter of blood, family, kingship, and vanished children, asking what art and touch can still hold after everything has gone away.
The speaker moves through daughters, wives, sons, cups, kisses, and worship with the unstable intimacy of someone speaking to both a dramatist and a rival patriarch. "Books have seeped away all your sons" is one of the harshest lines, making literature feel like a solvent that drains lineage and inheritance. The ending admires having taught kings and princes not to bow, but it also suspects that action itself can become a refusal to think.
'Sweet' / Shakespeare: a dense address to the bard weaving blood, kingdoms, gratification in death, and the fire 'put in and not out.' The speaker oscillates between worship and intrusion (will I kiss you, or should I kiss you), collapsing lineage into a single courtly gesture.