QUEEN GERTRUDE
There is a willow
grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar
leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic
garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers,
nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds
give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do
dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent
boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an
envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy
trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping
brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile
they bore her up:
Which time she chanted
snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of
her own distress,
Or like a creature
native and indued
Unto that element: but
long it could not be
Till that her
garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch
from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
Thanatos and Eros are the two forces battling within us to
drive our lives. As all animals do we keep ourselves out of danger and have a healthy
aversion to death, ergo Eros. However just Eros didn’t explain to Freud the
complex behaviour and psychology of the human mind. Thanatos explained why we
act in certain way which wasn’t in accordance with Eros. When this occurs, deep
within the psyche we aim to die, as a return to the womb, we wish to go back to
the peaceful place that came before.
But I want to talk about how death is uncanny and I will use
Ophelia’s death to exemplify. Gertrude describes Ophelia’s death and as she
dies things come alive around her, personification breathes animation into
elements. We read (or hear if played) the voice of the dead, we listen to Ophelia
sing though she has already died, therefore the speech is haunted by
prosopopeia. Death is aestheticized through the passage and Ophelia’s dying
body is romanticised; these are why her death has an uncanny quality. This
passage, far from conjuring images of horror or trepidation, as death may often
do, draws us in to the sweet singing symphony of the elegiac imagery where
death is strange and beautiful.
In Ophelia’s death the water seems to seduce her, calling
her to her death. The description of her drowning has a strangely beautiful and
alluring quality, in an act which would be, in reality, terrifying. The whole
passage is gentle, graceful and slow compared to the actuality of drowning. The
beauty of the anthropomorphised brook is in the image of it ‘weeping’ as
Ophelia falls. The fact that her clothes ‘bore her up’ is discordant with the
fundamental aspect of drowning. To drown is to sink, to go down not up. Because
drown is a portmanteau of down, to descend is inherent in its syntax. But she floats
like a seraphic being as she drowns. The halcyon river is weeping; this soft
emotional way to describe crying, gives the stream, not just human qualities
but caring, empathic characteristics.
In the ‘death by water’ section of The Waste Land, Brookes
JR notes what is ’also readily apparent is its force as a symbol of surrender and
relief through surrender.’ This idea of surrendering to water and gaining
relief by this is visible in the way Ophelia drowns. She comes willingly down
to the river and falls without a struggle into the water, surrendering to it,
to death. The indication of her being ‘native’ reflects her unification with
the river and the sense of her belonging to the water. She merges with the
open, inviting river that will end her life. The drowning is a sensual
experience, an unfurling into water. The delicate flowers she carries to her
death are symbolic of her fragility, or her virginity. The bloomed flowers, her
nascent sexuality, are drowned when she falls. She merges her body with the
body of the river, seeming to be, in a flickering moment, amphibious. The most
overtly sexual symbol in the speech can’t be skimmed over. The long purples,
dead men’s fingers or when talking to shepherds a grosser appellation, are
axiomatically phallic.
Ophelia is or was in love but is being driven mad. Instead
of a natural progression in events, i.e. the reciprocity of feeling from Hamlet,
there is death. Death replaces or impedes upon the climax of the love story. Or
perhaps not, maybe death is the acme of the text or her role; the narrative has
achieved its aim and can end.
The old lauds sung in Ophelia’s dying moments are generally
recognised as a sign of her madness and inability to ascertain the danger she
is in. Alternatively I believe the
singing intensifies the sexual undercurrents and magical qualities of the
speech. The snatches of hymns are almost a serenade to the water, a ‘honeyed sound‘
that can be read in the flowing rhythm of the speech. Perhaps, her voice like a
siren, charms her as she dies. She gives in to the pull of the water and is
lulled by death.
