A playhouse is the world
And all the actors merely people With their lives and loves and sorrows. The sound and fury of the stage
Is the echo of the anguish of mankind. It signifies the pain and grief and joy, The loves, the sacrifice, the noble deeds, That happen in our lives.
It’s nothing, the Bard says.
What cynic was the Bard
To sit in judgment on us all,
To mock us, to observe detached The angst of people’s lives?
And yet without the cynic,
Without detached observance,
Would we have had the grandeur
Of his drama and his verse,
His tragic and his comic depiction of men’s folly?
Only a rock, an island,
Who has felt the pain of love and loss and fury, And will not feel again,
Can hold himself detached enough to understand