On her left breast
A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops
I' the bottom of a cowslip

Jag har just läst ut Cymbeline. Den var min reselektyr när jag var på arbetsresa till Danmark förra vecka, läste den på tåget, och på färjan Göteborg-Fredrikshamn, bland blinkande spelautomater, räksmörgåsar, parfymdoftande taxfreevaror. Vare sig man väljer att se pjäsen - en av hans senare - som ett försök av Shakespeare att ge sig ut på okänd mark eller en parodisk rekapitulering av allt han tidigare skrivit är den onekligen märklig. Men sorgesången över den skendöda Imogen får mig att rysa varje gång jag läser den:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o' the great;
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownéd be thy grave!

[Hugh Kenner i The Pound Era:

"Golden lads": fine words to caress our post-Symbolist sensibilities. English lads, perhaps, with yellow hair; "golden," because once precious when they lived; "golden," touched with the nobility and permanence of gold (that royal metal, colored like a cold sun, in which wages are paid), as now, gone home, they receive the wages of immortality; "golden," in contrast to "dust": a contrast of color, a contrast of substantiality, a contrast of two immemorial symbols, at once Christian and pagan: the dust to which all sons of Adam return, the gold by which human vitality braves time; dust, moreover, the environment of chimney-sweepers, against whose lot is set the prominence of shining youth, la jeunesse dorée, who may expect to make more of life than a chimney-sweeper does, but whom death at last claims equally. "Golden," magical word, irradiates the stanza so that we barely think to ask how Shakespeare may have found it.

Yet a good guess at how he found it is feasible, for in the mid-20th century a visitor to Shakespeare's Warwickshire meat a countryman blowing the grey head off a dandelion: "We call these golden boys chimney-sweepers when they go to seed."

And all is clear? They are shaped like a chimney-sweeper's broom. They come to dust when the wind disintegrates them. And as "golden lads," nodding their golden heads in the meadows around Stratford, the homely dandelions that wilt in the heat of the sun and would have no chance against the furious winter's rages, but seed never confront winter because they turn to chimney-sweepers and come to dust, would have offered Shakespeare exactly what he needed to establish Fidele's death in Cymbeline as an easy, assimilable instance of nature's custom.

Death as the blowing of a common flower: that is how he seems to have understood what he was writing. Then very early in the play's career, perhaps on the afternoon of the first performance if there were no Warwickshire ears in the Globe to hear that Warwickshire idiom, the dandelions and their structure of meaning simply dropped out. Yet for 350 years no one has reported a chasm. Even in the great age of conjectural emendations no editor emends "golden" to some more assimilable word. Also no one remarks upon its beauty. Hanmer or Theobald may have thought it "incorrect" byt authentic, scribbled without pause for a second thought, in one of the thousand lines Ben Jonson wished his great colleague had bloted. One sign of Augustan dissatisfaction is detectable: in 1749 William Collins felt moved to rewrite the entire song, omitting among many other words the word "golden."

But we, the heirs of Mallarmé and Valéry and Eliot, do not simply pass over "golden" but find it richly Shakespearean, its very indefiniteness interacting as though chemically with the other words in the poem.

s 121-122]

[Hagberg, förresten: Räds ej mer för solens glöd, / Ej för bistra vintersnön! / Du har lemnat jordens nöd, / Nått ditt hem och fått din lön: / Sven och mö med lockars gull / Måste bli till kolsvart mull.]


Idag kände jag den första höstvinden.