2026, God willing, promises to be a marvelous year for me. I’ve signed on full-heartedly to Taylor D’Amico’s Shakespeare in a Year, endeavoring to read the entire published corpus of his works, including all the plays and poems. While I am not planning on making all of Poesophy’s Monday close-readings into Shakespeare Central, do expect to see a lot more Shakespeare here.
This can’t be bad, not least because of the Bard’s vast influence and import — but in addition to any cultural relevance he might possess as a figure himself, there’s also the vast breadth and depth of his content and insight, which spans across much of the history, philosophy, politics, literature, religio-spirituality, and even science of his time, which thus offers us a great field of wild and cultivated flowers and herbs to taste of, as well as various fauna to espy.
Back to “the Planet on the Table”
Prospero has been banished for some time from his home in Milan. This has something to do with political intrigue stemming from his brother, who seems to have been jealous and resentful toward Prospero’s “Liberal Arts” — Arts which weren’t simply liberating Prospero’s mind, but which seem to have given him magical powers, powers which led him to exile. When we arrive at the play, Prospero is in command of all of the elements. He can free Ariel from his imprisonment in a tree, he can cause Miranda to fall asleep on a command, and he can cause a shipwreck which brings his brother and his adversaries to his island. Throughout the play, we see Prospero using his powers like Hamlet to construct a sort of play that reveals the nature of the Political illness, all in pursuit of restoring order and returning home. Once this has been accomplished, he forsakes his magic and surrenders himself back into the natural order.
Prospero:1
Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint. Now ‘tis true I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell, But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. (from William Shakespeare's The Tempest)
“My charms are o’erthrown.” I have given up my magical powers which I have gathered from dark arts, and I submit myself to a new humility: “what strength I have’s mine own, / which is most faint.” I am submitting to a more natural balance where I am simply a man, no longer commanding spirits, but relying instead on the basic talents of my creativity and rhetoric. The power is “most faint” in comparison to magic, but here’s the thing — it’s real. Part of why he was exiled is because he became too powerful. This is a new admission — I accept my powerlessness in want of a more complete and integrated life.
But the Spiritual world is still there. He simply accepts its power beyond him. Allowing the “Spirits to enforce,” he takes on a new role as artist, “art to enchant.” That is, art to bring the world into a place where it can apprehend the mysterious quality of Beauty — that transcendental which is most necessary for life to be really real. Like Coleridge who can “See, not feel how beautiful the world is,” Prospero here subjects himself to a mode of co-creation that brings him into that that much longed for sense of Participation. The dark arts weren’t about Participation, but control. Here he is rendering himself poetically as Man, fallen, troubled, but truly himself.
The Reader’s Sacred Work
Prospero calls to us as in the manner of a prayer: “release me from my bands” he asks God, who is experienced as Us, the reading audience. May the Holy Spirit present whenever two or three are gathered “my sails / must fill.” The prayer pierces. Without this inspiration, no return home. While he has forsaken magic, spirituality is still necessary. But with a True goal: “to please.” “Prodesse et Delectare” Horace once wrote of the purpose of literature. To instruct and to delight. Prospero, Shakespeare, is asking us to learn from his/their own mistakes. We have been entertained, enchanted and detained, by the delights of the play — its humor, its romance, its intrigue. But the Beauty registers only once we’ve sensed the import, that is, the moral. Do not use your art to control, but to serve.
Ariel is Free
Consider Ariel. If you recall, we spoke a couple of weeks ago how Stevens chose Ariel, not Prospero, as the subject of his poem “The Planet on the Table”. “Ariel was glad that he had made his poems.” What these poems are, exactly, is part of Stevens’ poem. Ariel spends the entire play doing Prospero’s work, sometimes begrudgingly, but just as often gleefully. Whatever poiesis might be present in these “makings” (these fictions), is for us, for Stevens, for God to decide. And yet Stevens calls them “poems.” As in the moment where Ariel does incant what we might call a (Shakespeare’s) poem:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.
It is true that this is what we call a poem. It is also true that it was composed in order to enact the will of Prospero. Ding dong.
It Assaults Mercy Itself
Prospero (Shakespeare) has been shown Mercy — the life safe on the island, the privilege to return home — just as Prospero (Shakespeare/Stevens) has shown Mercy to Ariel. But these Mercies are built on Prospero’s Pride, “Beauty that must die.” Prospero must confess his sins and, though he doesn’t seem particularly specific or even remorseful, he does accept that this is so.
And in this acceptance, his offering of his life and will to God, he prays as Christ teaches us to pray, in private (although visible to us, to God), asking for forgiveness “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Let he who is without Sin cast the first stone, Prospero seems to be saying. He is guilty of Pride, aren’t we all? By freeing himself from exile as he freed Ariel from imprisonment, he is also giving up being Master of his world. His petty tyranny as King of the island, like his petty tyranny as isolated magician in his studies while cloistered in Milan, was a prison of his own making, like the prison of an addict in the grips of her substances.
Like those who enter an anonymous space to call themselves “Powerless over alcohol,” confessing all of the resentments and “defects of character” which became their entire Character in the midst of their addiction, Prospero is saying Goodbye to the stage. Exeunt.
“O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
And would we aught behold, of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allowed
To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd,
Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the Earth—
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element!”
— Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode”)
Source and End
In his farewell to the stage, Shakespeare knew what Stevens would also come to know in the end: that his magic must be surrendered to be fulfilled. Perhaps the work “in eternal lines to time” would grow, perhaps they would be forgotten in the decades following his corporeal death. And yet Shakespeare’s words live on, as Stevens’ may. Who knows? What we do know is that each man had to see his finitude in order to live in the world with or without his Art. And that Art, those Liberal Arts, could free the mind only in so far as he could find some instance of this Wisdom.
“She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.”
— Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”
“Death is the Mother of Beauty,” Stevens wrote. “Hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams / and our desires.” By recognizing the impermanence not only of his life, but also of Desire itself, the poet imagines a final reunion in which he no longer exists. This is called “Salvation,” or, in Buddhism, “Enlightenment.” The cessation of the perpetual cycle of death and rebirth, the ultimate, final Death in the ultimate, eternal Birth. The ultimate reincarnation of the Logos into the Age to come.
For the time being, we are here to read, to share, to participate. Prospero’s (Ariel’s, Shakespeare’s, Stevens’) Liberty is in our hands.
Praise Be to God.
Prospero is the rightful Duke of Milan who was overthrown by his brother Antonio twelve years before the play begins. Exiled to a remote island with his infant daughter Miranda, Prospero spent those years mastering magic through his books, eventually enslaving the spirit Ariel and the “savage” Caliban. When the play opens, Prospero uses his magic to raise a tempest that shipwrecks his enemies—including Antonio and the King of Naples—on his island. He controls everything that happens in the play: every encounter, every revelation, every reconciliation. He is the artist-figure, the maker, often read as Shakespeare’s self-portrait—the one who conjures illusions, orchestrates events, and ultimately reveals truth through theatrical magic. At the play’s end, Prospero gets what he wanted: his dukedom restored, his daughter married to the Prince of Naples, his enemies repentant. He frees Ariel, renounces his magic, and prepares to return to Milan. But then the play ends, the actors bow, and Prospero steps forward alone to deliver this epilogue directly to the audience—no longer as the Duke or the magician, but as an actor asking to be released from the stage. This is where the maker becomes the one who needs making, where the controller becomes the one needing grace. It’s Shakespeare’s farewell (his last solo-authored play), and it’s the moment when the artist admits his absolute dependence on those who receive his work.