Twin series, 1: I am woman, hear me roar

Ophelia to the Court

by Meghan O’Rourke

 

My shoes are unpolished, my words smudged.

I come to you undressed (the lord, he whispers

Smut; that man, he whispers such). I bend

My thoughts, I submit, but a bird

Keeps flying from my mind, it slippers

My feet and sings—barren world,

I have been a little minx in it, not at all

Domestic, not at all clean, not at all blinking

At my lies. First he thought he had a wife, then

(of course) he thought he had a whore. All

I wanted (if I may speak for myself) was: more.

If only one of you had said, I hold

Your craven breaking soul, I see the pieces,

I feel them in my hands, idle silver, idle gold…

You see I cannot speak without telling what I am.

I disobey the death you gave me, love.

If you must be, then be not with me.

 

*

 

Ode

by Elizabeth Alexander

 

I love all the mom bodies at this beach,

the tummies, the one-piece bathing suits,

the bosoms that slope, the wide nice bottoms,

thigh flesh shirred as gentle wind shirrs a pond.

 

So many sensible haircuts and ponytails!

These bodies show they have grown babies, then

nourished them, woken to their cries, fretted

at their fevers. Biceps have lifted and toted

 

the babies now printed on their mothers.

“If you lined up a hundred vaginas,

I could tell you which ones have borne children,”

the midwife says. In the secret place or

 

In sunlight at the beach, our bodies say

This is who we are, no, This is what

we have done and continue to do.

We labor in love. We do it. We mother.

 

 

*

Today begins the twinned poem series. The pairing of these two, Meghan O’Rourke’s “Ophelia to the Court” and Elizabeth Alexander’s “Ode” was an accident. They’ve been sitting in my photo library since May, past due, unnoticed and unused. Which is a pretty apt introduction for two poems that put upstaged figures into the spotlight.

 

Is it a stretch to twin these two poems? At first glance the difference in diction and subject matter makes them relatives only in the sense of third cousins twice-removed. That is, so distantly connected as to be strangers. O’Rourke’s poem takes on the voice of Hamlet’s Ophelia in a pseudo-Shakespearean tongue at the point in Ophelia’s brief life shortly before her death. As she tries to make an account of herself to the Danish court, Ophelia, for all her formal language, slips into rhyme here and there, the poetic form as haphazard as her thoughts. Alexander’s poem is determinedly conversational but set in the quatrains of a Horatian ode. The speaker praises the bodies of ordinary women in the frank and intimate way that ordinary women might talk to each other, tummies, bottoms, vaginas, and exclamation points included.

 

I’ll tell you why I linked them after I take a brief look at each one.

 

A quick re-cap on Ophelia, Hamlet’s ill-fated girlfriend. Conflicted by obedience to her male relatives and love for Hamlet, Ophelia’s pushed into action like a pinball. She goes mad with grief over her father’s death and Hamlet’s rejection. In her last appearances before she falls out of a willow tree and drowns, she sings nonsensical songs and hands out flowers. (Ophelia is the original mad pretty girl. Link here for a discussion of the Ophelia trope, and follow the drop-down menus with examples from film, literature, etc.) Without giving a dissertation on the play or on the hundreds of years of literary commentary on her character, let me just say she’s a frail, sad thing whose life and death seem to exist only in the service of advancing the plot for Hamlet’s tragedy.

 

O’Rourke re-examines her, and while she’s not the first to give Ophelia a life outside the play (Dating Hamlet being one of the silliest of the titles), her portrait is nuanced, sympathetic and complete in a mere seventeen lines.

 

O’Rourke’s Ophelia is not the virtuous pre-wife Hamlet and her father expect her to be. For all her intention to bend and submit to their wills, her mind (and what a description this is of errant thoughts) goes its own way—

 

a bird

Keeps flying from my mind, it slippers

My feet and sings

 

She’s a mess, she says, a liar, undomestic, unclean. She is as she is and not as they would have her be. In her last moments she asks to be seen in all her complications. This plea, so beautifully expressed, will stay with me for a long time—

 

 

If only one of you had said, I hold

Your craven breaking soul, I see the pieces,

I feel them in my hands, idle silver, idle gold…

 

 

However many times I’ve read this poem, I’m still befuddled by the last two lines—

 

I disobey the death you gave me, love.

If you must be, then be not with me.

 

Any insight you have is appreciated.

 

 

*

 

Alexander also takes up a rejected type—the Mom. An overweight woman, an un-ripped woman, the woman too busy to obsess over her booty.

 

A woman on the beach has long been a subject of praise, mostly in cinematic or photographic odes rather than literary ones. You can already picture her. She’s in a bathing suit, probably a bikini. She’s thin with large breasts or a shapely bottom or both. In your mind’s eye you see Ursula Andress and Halle Barre in James Bond movies, Bo Derek in 10. Annette Funicello and Gidget if you’re older or nostalgic. What you are seeing is the stuff of male fantasies and the wellspring for a lot of female self-hatred.

 

What you’ll see if you go to an actual beach and look at the actual people populating it is the mom body. Alexander makes beautiful what polite people pretend not to notice and what nasty people ridicule—

 

thigh flesh shirred as gentle wind shirrs a pond

 

She loves the mom bodies because those are the bodies that have loved well. How I appreciate this description of early motherhood—

 

These bodies show they have grown babies, then

nourished them, woken to their cries, fretted

at their fevers. Biceps have lifted and toted

 

the babies now printed on their mothers.

 

The “dad bod” has had its moment in the sun as a sexy, desirable figure. But Alexander isn’t arguing for the sexiness of the mom body the way zaftig singer and flutist Lizzo argues for her own. She’s throwing out those glasses altogether, the glasses that measure people in terms of their carnal value. These bodies are not products for erotic consumption, she says; their beauty is in what they do, have done:

 

In sunlight at the beach, our bodies say

This is who we are, no, This is what

we have done and continue to do.

We labor in love. We do it. We mother

 

*

 

Both O’Rourke’s Ophelia and Alexander’s beach moms are being judged. The “court” of the title in the first poem does double work as “court of law” where you plead your case and a medieval royal court where roles are rigid and prescribed. The beach too, is an arena for judging. People-watchers evaluate and sometimes comment on the exposed bodies on display. The terms the women in the two poems are usually judged on are male terms, even if the judgments come from ladies at court or other women on the beach. What a man expects and desires a women to be is what she should be. No thanks, says Ophelia. No way, says Alexander.

 

When I read these two poems, I hear women asking to be released from self-hatred. Women who feel like failures because one way or other they’ve been told they don’t measure up. O’Rourke’s Ophelia laments, If only one of you. . . . Alexander takes up the challenge and sees silver and gold where others have looked away.

 

*

 

Because this post is already so long, I’m going to link to bios of the poets rather than cover them here. Click here for a bio of poet Meghan O’Rourke.

 

And here for a bio of Elizabeth Alexander from a previous Poem Elf post (scroll towards the bottom of the post.)