To Be or Not to Be

As most everyone who has taken a high school course in English lit knows, the famous "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy from Shakespeare's Hamlet is an extensive pondering of suicide.

"To be or not to be, that is the question..." Live or not live?

It has some of the most beautiful language, IMHO, in literature.

"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action."  Most lovely way to say he chickened out of suicide.  (Personally, I do not see it as chickening out, but Hamlet did, and in this circumstance, we are allowed into a mind slowly going mad.  He dies at the end anyway, along with eveyone else, just about)

Sylvia Plath's Daddy is a stark descent into madness, mentioning a suicide attempt:

...I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said, I do, I do...

Lest you think I'm obsessing over suicide, really, I just entertain myself by memorizing poetry so I can think about it later.  It's also a fun party trick (well, at least at the parties I go to!) when someone says, "Oh, man, there's this poem, and I can't think of anything except, it's about carrying a heart" and I'm all, "YES!  ee cummings!" and launch into: 

I carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling) ..."


Honestly, I rarely pass by an opportunity to show off this skill.

Picking a favorite poem is like picking a favorite child, but this next one is speaking to me a bit today.  Waaaaaay back in days of yore, when I was in college, I had this guy friend who, during a dark period of my life, made it his mission to teach me how to lighten the hell up.  He taught me how to play quarters, that being late to class never killed anybody, and no matter how crazy life can seem, it is an uncontrollable beauty.

He slipped this to me in class one day:


My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing

Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror,
Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
Yet leaping before red apopleptic streetcars—
Misfit in any space. And never on time.

A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only
With words and people and love you move at ease;
In traffic of wit expertly maneuver
And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
So gaily in love's unbreakable heaven
Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.

Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses—
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.

by JF. Nims