The Story of a Poem (“Young Prospero”)

“Young Prospero ” is an early poem of mine, written in November, 1978, right as I began thinking that my gift for writing poems might be termed literary, on the level with what I had been reading in The Norton Anthology.

I wrote my first poem when I was ten years old, home sick with a cold, on a lined index card, several couplets about the explorer Christoper Columbus that rhymed (cleverly I might add, “New World” with a ship’s sails that were “unfurled.”).

I had written several direct emotion, feeling-first poems that somehow made it into my high school literary magazine. My junior high and high school exposure to literature was minimal, if not miniscule, or barely a whiff.

I was aware that my grandfather Grey liked the poems of Ogden Nash. McKuen and Nimoy, not MacLeish and Neruda, were the poets best known in that shag-carpet era.

I knew that song lyrics and hymns, were poems set to music, a fact confirmed four decades later when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition."

As a college sophomore, rail-thin, tweedy and bearded, I read the Imagists (Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, H.D.) and believed they had it right to leave direct expression out a poem, to rely on the power of the image, state emotion indirectly and let the reader figure it out from the images. In just eight lines (combined) Ezra Pound in “In the Station of the Metro” plus Dr. Williams in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” have given us the best poetry you will ever read.

Due to some extra funds freed up from the sale of a house as part of my parent’s divorce settlement, I was able to spend four months abroad in the Fall of 1978, my junior year, twenty students along with two professors, touring England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, and at the end of the semester, Italy and Israel.

Our home base that semester was a religious conference center in Herne Bay, Kent, a small seaside town, located west of London, six miles north of Canterbury, right off the A299 (Thanet Road) as you head to Margate, which was already a setting in a famous poem (On Margate Sands,/I can connect/Nothing with nothing — “The Waste Land”)

In early September, I’d written a breakthrough poem atop Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh, folksy and outdoorsy about getting up early to watch a sunrise over the Firth of Forth (which rhymes with “Athens of the North”).

I had been reading major poets on location: Dylan Thomas (in Chepstow, Wales), and W.B. Yeats (in Dublin) and Gerard Manly Hopkins (“The Windhover” and “God’s Grandeur”), following a haphazard Hopkins itinerary of Oxford, Lancashire and Dublin.

That fall, I was primed by poets and inspired by the wealth of landscape: Braemar in the Scottish Highlands, the Border Country, the Yorkshire Moors, the Lake District, the coastline of Northern Wales, Warwickshire (Stratford-Upon-Avon), and serene, rural Kent including Canterbury (Chaucerian, without any reading Chaucer).

My limited literary exposure as a native Californian had been the novels of my Golden State neighbors John Steinbeck (Salinas Valley) and John Fante (L.A.). The landscape might best be described as coastal desert or highway offramp chic (I had not yet been introduced to the writing of Charles Bukowski or Joan Didion). I considered Southern California a shallow culture, quipping, “In Los Angeles, ‘History’ means what happened yesterday afternoon.”

England was overwhelming, in a good way.

I was drowning, and wanted no saving.

For a class on writing theatre criticism, our student group took the British Rail train into London most Saturday mornings, exploring the city on our own during the day, then meeting up at the National Theater on Saturday evening for a Royal Shakespeare Company production. We took the last train out of Paddington Saturday evening, returning to Herne Bay after midnight. We slept in on Sundays, with a review (handwritten) of the Saturday evening production due on Monday afternoon.

I enjoyed those London Saturdays, venturing alone to Division One English football matches, buying a scalped ticket outside the ground: Ipswich vs. Arsenal (in the old Highbury stadium, now a housing development), and a contentious, riotous London Derby, Tottenham Hotspur vs. Chelsea (at Fulham Road).

The poem “Young Prospero” was composed at the seaside promenade, Herne Bay, Kent, the day after watching of a production of The Tempest at the National Theater in London.

I probably should have been back in my room at the conference center, writing my play review, which would focus mainly on Sir Michael Hordern as Prospero. Hordern had been superb, and I read in the playbill he had the lead role in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, six years earlier at the Old Vic, opposite Diana Rigg.

I was 6,000 miles from home on a Sunday afternoon, exiled in a way, wistful, overlooking the northern Kent shoreline, remembering Butterfly Beach in Santa Barbara (“another coast”), yet also realizing I was squarely at home among a tradition of Anglo-Irish-Welsh writers, by way of this stretch of English shingle.

England was my Tempest island.

My poem imagines Shakespeare’s Prospero at age 20 (pre-Miranda, pre-Caliban), when he first arrives on the island, the usurped Duke of Milan, isolated and marooned, yet able to become a magician. What a trade off.

This was the promise of poetry. Separate yourself carefully, but earn your way back into the world with what you observe, and the language you use to capture it.

As a surfer, I had always been a student of waves, how they formed, how they broke, the immense energy unleashed, and then how they vanished with nothing left but foam on rocks. That was a metaphor for quite a bit of life.

On a larger scale, I had a heightened awareness of coastlines as significant places, as borders between land and sea, as demarcation points (costa, from the Latin word for rib), as embarkation points, leaving one thing for another. And even greater than a coastline, was the sea itself, the greatest organism on earth, if you thought of it that way, the oceans, collectively as a protaginist.

I’d read Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” (written just 40 miles away, on another Kent coastline), and I wanted to weave echoes of that poem into my Shakespeare riff.

“Young Prospero” is 32 lines in length, written in the first person, as a theatrical monologue.

The poem is basically two 16-line sonnets, that don’t follow the sonnet form at all.

The first eight couplets are written in a first-person, 1978-era, modern conversational style.

Then the poem switches gears.

The final eight couplets are more stylistic, dialing up the rhyme and meter, as they intentionally echo and imitate Prospero’s Epilogue in Act V. of The Tempest, where he gives up his magic (Now my charms are all o’erthrown…)

“Young Prospero” is a manifesto, perhaps a confessional, hopefully a predictor of the life ahead, and certainly a tribute to those of us who take up the cloak of magic, and lose a little bit of humanity in the process.

Contrary to Heraclitus’ Doctrine of Flux, I may have a completely different chemical composition four decades later, but I am unchanged from that November day in Herne Bay. I remain that young man standing wistfully on that English strand, and I am also the Shakespearean character from The Tempest, imagined on my own terms.

I am grateful to my friend Patrick Zuroske, who saved a typewritten version of the poem, and returned to me after 45 years of safekeeping in his file cabinet.

Young Prospero (1978)

But how is it/ That this lives in thy mind?
What seest thou else/In the dark backward
and abysm of time?

• William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Act I, scene 2)

In my twentieth year, I watch the sea,
as an apprentice observes the master.

I am there when the angling swell
is conjured with a sleight of hand,

when each wave debuts, holding
its breath as it lifts up boldly,

and dashes onto the pebbled shore
to vanish as foam among the rocks.

Are you listening? Someday you
might be exiled in a similar way,

without maps or bearings;
only the sea is familiar, prevailing

westerly of another coast,
where gulls dip into troughs,

wings lifting and gliding
above a boy on the sand.

Patience audience, I am compelled
at this beginning point to tell,

that I am here, at least to please,
to make this island mine and seize,

that residency might lead to growth
and maturity for waning youth,

which I arrived here with, but will
eventually trade for craft and skill.

Our revels start on this archipelago,
home to deep dreaming, and art.

Please feel free to confront,
for the rough bite of metal shears

that prune will be a blessing soon;
the branch bears nothing apart

from the vine. As distance is my fear,
above all else, please, draw near.