This wandering boy would sometimes sleep in the fields before returning to his family’s house, tired and exhausted, not because of the cold that consumed him under the apple tree, where he would lie down to write poetry, or so he imagined, until he became convinced that one day he would become a great poet far away from this sea. Dark in color, which flocks of ducks do not stop caressing throughout the day and until sunset.
All these romances meant nothing to his father, who also lost his job, so he sent him to work for a butcher in the small town. The butcher soon discovered that whenever he slaughtered a cow, his assistant would withdraw and write a poem eulogizing her. A poem about the sadness of cows, and a poem about the love of girls. Between these and that, he immersed himself in reading, especially historical ones. The young boy had not yet grown his small beard, which would bear his only image throughout the centuries. Every day before the holiday, young teenagers in the town square share salty jokes, read poetry, dance and simple joys. As he grows up a little, he decides to leave his town and its small world to cities and their big dreams. There he will try a new type of writing: theatrical poetry. Here he begins diving into the meanings of life, discovers the deception of women, and begins satirizing them. A woman is nothing but a “liar,” “deceitful,” “rude,” and “contemptible.” And “black as hell,” and “dark as night.” There is no doubt that all these expressions indicated his failure in love. He was not satisfied with his temptations, just as fire is not satisfied with firewood and the sea is not satisfied with rivers.
“Love is my sin,” he says in one of his poems full of bitterness. He will imagine stories full of love and lovers, wishing he could reach them. In a wave of nostalgia, he invented the most famous lovers in history, or rather, the two most famous lovers, Romeo and Juliet. As usual, he chose for them the beauty of Italy and the splendor of the city of Verona, a stage on which they would rather die than contemplate love. He turned the theater into his own workshop, and began to create heroes and characters who were angry and happy, disappointed and disgraced, and other human models that enabled him to write thirty plays, which made him the most important English poet yesterday, today and tomorrow.
The boy who slept under the apple tree in Stratford on the River Avon and wrote poems lamenting the cows became one of the world’s greatest poets. His friend, the also genius Ben Johnson, called him “the beautiful swan.” But the poet of beauty is also the poet of bows: Othello, Richard III, Macbeth, and all the other masters of thunder.
2023-11-11 00:04:21
#Cow #poet
