Sandburg, They All Want to Play Hamlet

Sometimes poems get stuck in my head, like songs or show tunes or jingles from radio commercials. Does that ever happen to you? Today I woke up with a few lines of this one, by Carl Sandburg, rattling around in there, so I thought I'd share it.

II. People Who Must

6. They All Want to Play Hamlet

They all want to play Hamlet.

They have not exactly seen their fathers killed

Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,

Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,

Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,

Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of flowers--O flowers,

       flowers slung by a dancing girl--in the saddest play the inkfish,

       Shakespeare, ever wrote;

Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad

      and to stand by an open grave with a joker's skull in the hand and then

      to say over slow and say over slow wise, keen, beautiful words masking

      a heart that's breaking, breaking,

This is something that calls and calls to their blood.

They are  acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be

      particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.

--Carl Sandburg, Smoke and Steel (1922)            

 I  don't really think of this poem as an insult to actors, but if that was its sole intention, it would make sense--even though the play's the thing, Shakespeare himself was not a fan of actors and did not paint them well in his works, particularly in Hamlet. 

Instead I like this poem more as a general caution, an urging to understand the role you want to play before you attempt to play it. Actors, per Sandburg, are so swift to use their own personal heartbreak as fodder for some grand, well-crafted performance, THE performance that is all the sound and the fury an actor could want, without stopping to wonder what that performance would really, truly demand of them.

If we, as readers, look at the actors metaphorically, then we could reason the poem speaks to a sort of universal empathy, or a block that limits the capacity for empathy among all individuals. We don't know what it's like to suffer as Hamlet suffered (or how our friends/neighbors/relatives have suffered), so can we ever really connect with them completely? Even sad people, as all actors are sad people, cannot know the extent of the sadness of others, and yet we desperately want to because that is the proverbial role of a lifetime, the grand, well-crafted performance we know as friendship, community, and love.