Oddfellow
(a commentary on Shakespeare's 'Othello')
To see a black ram tupping his white ewe,
Brabantio deemed that witchcraft did ensue,
That drugs or magic, some forbidden art,
Subdued a maid, from home and hearth to part.
Color contrasting underneath their robes,
His daughter, with her pair of ivory globes,
Was to a Moor of sooty bosom knit,
Fueling the frenzy of a father's fit.
To make the beast with two backs was their course,
He, likened to a slave or barbary horse,
She, a fresh lily, whiter than the sheet,
Winning a match in nocturnal defeat.
Bating in her cheeks, her unmanned blood
Like simple modesty in unchecked flood,
Would flow by his black mantle's hooding sway.
At night-time he would prove her noon-time day.
How could a dove with this raven unite,
By their own beauties doing amorous rite?
Yet love is blind, seeing but from the heart,
And she enamored of his valiant part.
Love's night is noon, it serves a fixèd mark,
To souls adrift, as star to wandering bark,
In measuring kingdoms, fears not to embark,
Makes no distinction betwixt light and dark.
So, as the Duke concludes in the first act:
"Your son-in-law is far more fair than black."
Villains and heros come in every hue,
Angels and demons, saints and sinners too.
As Melville notes, in his seafaring tale
Of Moby Dick, the bear, the shark, the whale,
Of many species known to tear or bite,
The most malicious beasts are clad in white.
When, at the outset, God created man,
Setting in motion his eternal plan,
He specified that man and wife enmesh,
Not fretting black and white become one flesh.
Fair Desdemona, then, was never stained.
And think, although Othello was constrained
To spare her snow-white, alabaster skin,
The blood of every one runs red within.
January 2005
