“Let us go then, you and I…”
Poetry is not about metaphor and meaning, not a puzzle to be solved. It’s just a form of communication and, different from prose, it’s really more akin to the visual arts.
This is why Shakespeare seems so flowery and didactic to modern audiences. On the bare Elizabethan stage, settings are made by dialogue, not by props and backdrops. Shakespeare seldom works on film because so much of the dialogue is bent on describing what you already see. The best production I ever saw was in London, where the only prop was a man-made boulder on stage. It was “The Tempest,,” and I had no problem believing the shipwreck, the island, the storm, or that Ariel was a sprite.
In that spirit I offer these two “comic book “ versions of two of my favorite poems. But they don’t alter the originals, they supplement them. A recognition that poems are, as I said, words coming as close as they can to the visual arts.
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