Zac Bantock - 25/25 - Reciting poetry perfectly (apparently)“Will you do something for me?” her voice runs in the same channel as her manner, that nobility, regal, dangerous. She promises to make it worth his while, that she has boys for the more onerous tasks. If his pulse might have quickened at that last mention he hopes she didn’t hear it. She is beautiful, and terrible, and perfect.
She’s everything he isn’t it seems.
She wants to hear a human poem, that irritates him a little but he hides it well enough, which is a surprise. Perhaps it’s just because he’s used to hiding other aspects of his life, of his feelings.
After all, it’s a simple enough request, he can think of a dozen that he could use, he could think of a hundred if he put his mind to it, but that isn’t really the problem. The trouble is trying to pick one, trying to find the words he knows from classes and reading, words he knows well but that for too long a moment seem to refuse to fall into any semblance of order, or at least no order that would constitute poetry.
When he does choose, it’s one that he learned of his own accord. It had stuck in his mind because it was beautiful, but dark, dangerously seductive. She might not feel the same, and he hopes he won’t offend with his choice, or his balking against the request she has made. It makes him feel too…
Too something, undefinable. Maybe though it’s just that he resents the poem that he had only half known he’d speak.
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.
The words come out with a pace measured to the meter of the poem, though now it conjures new images to mind, not a random skull at all, no body long sunk to the ocean floor but instead, he pictures his ‘Father’ and has to suppress a shudder with good manners and better posture. It’s because of the painting, because of the story behind it after all.
Maybe if he does well, he can help save a life, maybe if he does well there will be one less body to wash up on shore, one less body that will trade it’s eyes for pearls and its ribs for coral and sand.
