George Barker
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND THE
HORSE WITH WINGS
1
I have been invited to get up here and speak about William
Shakespeare: but to speak categorically about Shakespeare is what
any poet ought to know better than. For, like the weather or the
nature of women, almost anything can be said about him, and it
will almost certainly be wrong. But I suppose that one could, with
some hope of getting nearer the truth, speak about the first person
singular and what the poems of Shakespeare did to it. I could put
this quite simply: the poems of Shakespeare have had much the
same effect on me as owning a unicorn that could also speak.
If
anything at all can be said about the nature of poetry I
think that it can with truth be called mysterious. I use this word
in the sense that Albert Einstein used it when he said: The best
thing left to us in the world is a sense of the mysterious. I use the
word in the same sense as one would use it to describe the operations
of the Delphic Oracle or the monologues of a talking mongoose. Thus,
in the house of the poet, in the chamber of the poet, there is, myster–
iously enough, unnaturally enough-fabulously-getting in the way
of all domestic practices, frightening the children and the visitors,
and embarrassing everyone by its clearly mythical existence-there
is the recurrent mystery of the horse with wings.
It
is the allegorical
nature of poetry. For me the poems of Shakespeare are not re–
markable by reason of the knowledge that they display of the law,
or cartography, or botany: they are remarkable by reason of these
things being constantly turned into poetry in them. It is much more
remarkable that a man can make great poetry out of the copulation
of flies than that he can observe the fact that they do so. So that I
find the first and greatest gesture of Shakespeare is, for me, the
1 Text of a lecture delivered on Shakespeare's birthday at Stratford·on-Avon.
