Day 10 – Shakespeare & Plato
Shakespeare: King Lear, Act V, Scene 3
Lear’s lament over Cordelia
Context:
In the final scene of King Lear, the old king enters carrying the body
of Cordelia. Having lost everything — crown, sanity, daughters — he howls in
anguish. This is Shakespeare at his most raw, where language itself seems to
fracture under grief.
Extract (~40 lines):
Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for ever!
I know when one is dead, and when one lives;
She’s dead as earth. Lend me a looking glass;
If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
Why, then she lives.
…
Cordelia, Cordelia! stay a little. Ha!
What is’t thou say’st? Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.
I kill’d the slave that was a-hanging thee.
…
And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? O, thou wilt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,
Look there, look there!
[He dies.]
Reflection prompts:
- Copy
the line “Never, never, never, never, never!” — let the repetition
beat like a hammer.
- Notice
how Lear clings to small signs (a misted mirror, the lips moving) — the
human desperation to deny death.
- Compare
with Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle!” — despair there was
emptiness, here it is loss. Which feels closer to your own response to
death?
Plato: Phaedrus
The Charioteer Allegory, complete
Context:
Yesterday we began the image: the soul as a charioteer with two horses, one
noble, one unruly. Today, the full arc: the struggle of love, the pull between
reason and passion, and the way divine madness lifts the soul back toward its
wings.
Extract (~6 long paragraphs, Jowett translation, public
domain):
“The human soul, then, has the following nature. She is a
charioteer and a pair of winged horses. One of the horses is noble and of noble
breed; the other ignoble and of opposite breed. The driving, as might be
expected, is no easy matter.
“When the charioteer beholds the beloved and grows warm
through recollection, the stream of beauty enters through the eyes and warms
the soul. Then the horses are all in a ferment; the obedient one, restrained by
shame, holds himself back; but the other, hardly yielding to the goad and whip,
leaps violently forward. The charioteer is pulled in opposite directions, in
pain and sweat, dragged one way by violence, the other by modesty.
“When he is drawn toward the beloved, and gazes upon the
vision of beauty, he is refreshed and warmed, and his soul is filled with the
greatest joy. At the sight, he is reminded of true beauty and grows wings
again. Then he would fain fly upward, but he is weighed down by the violence of
the bad horse.
“The struggle within the soul is fierce. When the worse
horse is overcome, led away by reason and shame, the whole soul follows with
reverence toward the beloved. Thus the lover reveres him as a god; he refrains
from outrage, and yields to the better horse. If both live a life of philosophy
and self-control, then they are happy here below, masters of themselves and
orderly. And when life is ended, they have wings and pass hence together, the
soul of the beloved following in the train of the lover.
“But if they surrender to the worse horse and live a life of
indulgence, they reap the harvest of shame, and their wings wither. In their
next life they will be weighted down and wander, until self-mastery restores
them.
“Thus, the madness of love, given by the gods, is the best.
For by it the soul remembers her wings, and in company with her beloved she
ascends once more to the place of the gods. Let no one fear such madness; for
in it is our greatest blessing.”
Reflection prompts:
- Copy
the phrase “By love the soul remembers her wings.”
- Do
you see this as allegory of every human passion, or as something specific
to erotic love?
- Place
it beside Lear’s howl. One voice rages at death’s finality; the other
dreams of the soul’s upward flight. How do they speak to each other?
✨ Today’s resonance:
Lear, bent and broken, cannot release Cordelia to the beyond. Socrates, by the
Ilissus, imagines love itself as the force that recalls the soul to its divine
origin. Between howl and hymn lies the whole spectrum of grief and
transcendence.
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