Classic Poem

1. FOUR CHARACTERS

Antonio, a special breed of existential cat:
a Christian, merchant, friend,
yet suffers from an enigmatic melancholy
Spits on the Jew.

Nerissa, a gnat who'd make an outstanding critic.
Pricks a literary convention before the bubble
has a chance to be launched.
A Sancho in Quixotic clothes.

Gratiano, a hot head.
If there are Jews in Venice
let them lock their doors
This man will hate them
and be itching for a fight
Prick him in his little finger
and be becomes the very foreskin of an anti-Jew.

Shylock. Is it possible a man can be so real
in the conventions of a tale of love,
he has the smell of boiled beef on his breath?

" The Jew, " says Gobbo, " is the very devil
in-carnation, "
and fun to taunt and defy.

Therefore after Shylock lost his child
and fortune, " all the boys in Venice follow him ,
Crying his stones, his daughter, his ducats! "
for did not Shakespeare give the signal
of impending villainy himself
by calling Shylock sixty times " the Jew " ?

What should one say? That the age
had not heard of the man of Sinai yet
who baked compassion into moral order?
Should one not say, " This family man
has tenderness and ancient humor
built in like the glow-worm's light "
That Shylock is an afterbirth
left by the monk's dame that begat the Devil,
the one who wrote the special dossier on the Jew
which split the Middle Ages like a lightning
bolt with this syllogism:
Man was born in sin. Only Christ can save
Christ is spurned by Jews. Therefore Jews
are sinister or perhaps not really men.

So when Antonio's bond was forfeited
and the gracious duke said
in his best melodious voice,
" We all expect a gentle answer, Jew! "
Shylock rode implacability to the end.

But so did Lear
and there were tears for Lear!

But we forget this is an early play,
a midsummer night's dream stabbed
by the long black caftan'd quiddity
of an earlier Italian villain,
before Barabbas!
that England had not seen a real
unbaptized Jew in three hundred years,
having banished these proto-bankers
along with their promissory notes.

Yet Shylock is a stronger brew than dreams
are made of, straightforward as his ducats
Doggett, a famous low comedian of his day,
played him as a sharper.
" But suppose, " as one apologist for Shylock wrote,
" that Shylock had subjected Antonio
to the same indignities, what would be thought? "

" Our sympathies are with him, " Hazlitt wrote.
" He is honest in his vices "
and the only way to play him
is as Kean did with a " terrible energy "

or with scorn for Gratiano, as Irving did,
hurling a thunderbolt of understatement
when the trial was over and he said,
" I pray you give me leave to go from hence ,
I am not well, " and (Irving) " walked away
to die in silence and alone " ;
or like Mansfield on " I am not well "
to gut himself/
or chuck it all
and outfit Shylock as a low comedian
in pants pouched like a kangaroo
with gravel voice and sad, repeated
pratfalls on enormous pancake shoes,
but keep the poetry in Venice
in a cubist blue-and-white stage.

2. BELMONT

A country of the mind
held subject by the harmony of friendship
and the perdurable vows of lovers
whose perpetual desires pump systole and diastole.

Chafing like a captive princess,
a fifteen-year-old suburban Jewess, Jessica
fled with her father's jewels and a monkey
and eloped to Belmont with a neoplatonic youth,
a handsome nonentity,
and the crusader Godfrey of Bouillon
drove the Jews of Jerusalem into the Synagogue
and burned it down.
And Shylock said,
" Let not the sound of shallow fopp'ry enter
my sober house. "
" In such a night
Medea gathered the enchanted herbs
that did renew old Aeson "

and in the sacked ghetto
two men wrestled for a pot

In such a night
stood Goebbels with a willow in his hand
upon the wild sea banks,
and the dead Jew lay
face up, a dog chewing on his hat.

All " vanish into thin air "
but the heavenly bodies which the ear
of Shakespeare heard in English,
the lovers buzzing in a hive of small acts
and the revellers materializing
into bone and gristle when they meet a Jew,
who grounds their euphoric charge.

All their ploy is jell'd in clearest amber,
but the Jew remains in Gratiano's craw

" What's that for ? "
" To bait fish withal ! "