David W. Landrum

Edgar

Edgar I nothing am.

I had to be four men besides myself:
a madman eating ditch-dogs, eating toads
and lacerating skin with thorny goads,
elf-knotted hair and chest besmirched with filth,
plagued by Flibbertigibbet, my mind’s health
sicker than scummy ponds, bowed by the load
of madness, moonstruck, wandering the roads,
a loincloth on my waist all I had left;
then when I killed Oswald an oafish swain
with rustic speech; a fisherman amazed
at Father’s supposed jump down to the shore
from Dover’s chalky cliffs; then when I faced
my brother Edmund’s challenge I became
another; then became myself once more.

Companion Piece

A note on the poem: The idea for the poem “Edgar” came after teaching King Lear to a group of college students and viewing the film version of it with James Earl Jones as Lear and Rene Auberjonois as Edgar. The role of Edgar requires tremendous acting skill, since the character also “acts” and takes on at least three other personae in the course of the play. This reminded me of the various roles I play, the characters I assume and have assumed, for various reasons, throughout my life. Edgar does this to survive. Perhaps our reasons for being other people are not so dire but none the less they are necessary to us, we play these roles, and we are relieved when we can put them aside and return to being ourselves. Shakespeare’s marvelous use of language, “Edgar I nothing am,” shows the erasure of self life often requires in order for us to get by; the syntactical confusion of words mirrors the disorder which we, as persons, are often forced to inhabit and, hopefully, emerge from in time.