The isle is full of noises

From The Tempest: Miranda and Ferdinand playing chess

Image: Wikipedia
The Chess Players attributed to Karel van Mander. This was identified in 1916 as an image of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare playing chess. Most scholars consider this to be pure speculation, but the claim was revived in 2004 by Jeffrey Netto, who argued that the chess game symbolises “the well known professional rivalry between these figures in terms of a battle of wits”.

Update: 2016 – Shakespeare died 400 years ago and today is Shakespeare day! I’ve decided to repost an entry of 4 years ago. Please enjoy my ‘contribution’ to Shakespeare day. The following is my entry of 2012.

I’ve written another cento – I had to, because it’s a chess one! I’ve taken again Shakespeare lines – like my Moonrider-cento , where I also used Shakespeare. A cento is a form of poetry, where you use lines of different poems. In this case [like Moonrider], I’ve used lines of Shakespeare’s works – and not different poems. This cento was much easier to put together than Moonrider, as they are shorter lines and I didn’t really spent that much time thinking how to merge it into a poem that makes sense. I couldn’t give it a title other than ‘A Game of Chess’. I have made minor changes here and there – to the word order or adding of an exclamation mark – just for effect. This ‘poem‘ is almost like a dialogue – as it’s various characters speaking in role from Shakespeare’s plays.

A Game of Chess
Sweet lord, you play me false
For a score of kingdoms you should wrangle
and I would call it fair play
How fares the king?
His hour is almost past

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!
And I have horse – will follow where the game makes way.
I have his horse!
Give me another horse!
So, the good horse is mine.
My day’s delight is past, my horse is gone.
The rascal hath removed my horse.

Are the knights ready to begin their triumph?
A wandering knight?
I am undone! The knight is here!
Great shouts within all cry ‘the mean knight!’
Great is the humour of this dreadful knight.

I dare thereupon pawn
My life I never held but as a pawn
I have not pawn’d to you my majesty?
I pawn’d thee none!
I’ll send some bishop to entreat
The bishop will be overborne by thee
Wat says my bully rook?

There stands my castle!
His queen, it was his queen!
Queen of queens, how far dost thou excel?
Come hither, come! Come, come, and take a queen
Sir your queen must overboard!
Will take your queen
Farewell sweet queen!

I’ll move the king.
The skipping king, he ambles up and down
This may gall him for some check
No mates for you!
We’ll draw!
My lord, your son drew my master
Where’s the master? Play the men!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown 

[Shakespeare-lines -]
Click on this link to read more about the Cento and to read what Folger Education think about my cento. I feel humble – you can view their comments in their comments box. Thank you!

–Click on this link to see the complete list of chess quotes with the references to the works of Shakespeare.

Enjoy Shakespeare day with some chess dancing!

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Moonrider

image: googleimages

CENTO
A poem consisting only of lines from other poems. This, from the Italian word for patchwork, is almost a technique rather than a form, especially as it can be of any length, and any metre, and need not rhyme; however, as the finished poem is referred to as a cento, just as a sonnet is called a sonnet, it is a form.

This is not my own poem. It’s actually not even a ‘real’ poem. All these lines are Shakespeare’s writing. What I’ve done, was to take lines – with the same theme, which is the moon, and put them together – and I was trying to get it to make sense. The title is my own though, of course. This is what  you call a ‘cento.’

I do love Shakespeare and my favourite is Hamlet, maybe because it was the book prescribed when it was my matric-year. It was always a nightmare, having to study Shakespeare and knowing all those quotes – I think I studied about 50 of the quotes. We had to know from what Act/Scene the quote was and you never knew which quotes you would get, but even that didn’t put me off from Shakespeare.

Moonrider

The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
It is the very error of the moon
Swifter than the wandering moon
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon
This old moon wanes!
She lingers my desires

Sweet moon, I thank thee for they sunny beams
So many journeys
That I, being govern’d by the waterymoon
Of the extreme verge:
for all beneath the moon
You moonshine revellers and shades of night
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Another moon: but, o, methinks, how slow
And the moon changes even as your mind
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon
My lord, I am a mile beyond the moon

-Shakespeare-‘lines’ (c) Nikita

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A quest of thoughts

Sonnet 46

Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war,
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine eye my heart thy picture’s sight would bar,
My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.
My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie,
A closet never pierc’d with crystal eyes
But the defendant doth that plea deny,
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
To side this title is impannelled
A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart;
And by their verdict is determined
The clear eye’s moiety, and the dear heart’s part:
As thus; mine eye’s due is thy outward part,
And my heart’s right, thy inward love of heart.

Shakespeare

Have fun and create your own Wordle here. The link will open in a new window. Follow the link and copy/paste your text and…voila! This is my Shakespeare contribution and I hope you enjoy it too!

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his heighth be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
   So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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If music be the food of love, play on

Image: allposters.com

From Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, 1601:

DUKE ORSINO:
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

Swallows in Durban – see the news article in this entry from ENS news

Enjoy “Village Swallows” by  Mantovani and his orchestra. It is a composition by Josef Strauss, one of the Strauss-brothers.

 

hmmm…just what I need…flowers and chocolates!! and on this video…the music of Strauss…”Roses from the South”

Swallow Flocks and World Cup Airport Try Coexistence

DURBAN, South Africa, November 12, 2007 (ENS) – This year, as five million barn swallows migrate from across Europe to roost in South Africa’s Mt. Moreland Reedbed, they will be greeted by air traffic controllers. The controllers will be waiting to warn pilots of the swallow flocks coming in to land so that bird-plane collisions can be avoided.

The plan to protect the birds was announced Monday at a ceremony at the reedbed, attended by the nonprofit conservation group BirdLife South Africa.

The decision to protect the swallows was made in response to global outcry last November, when BirdLife outlined its concern about the expansion of La Mercy Airport at Durban, in preparation for South Africa’s hosting of World Cup 2010.

The airport is being expanded to handle traffic expected for the soccer event and the KwaZulu Natal government wants to see the project completed by 2009.

The Airports Company of South Africa, which administers the existing Durban International Airport, owns the La Mercy land where the $8 billion King Shaka International Airport is under construction, 30 kilometers (20 miles) north of Durban.

The new airport is expected to replace Durban International, which will be decommissioned. But for the swallows at the Mt. Moreland Reedbed, without special planning and accomodation, the airport would have been deadly.

Both the reed bed and Mount Moreland are situated South West of the proposed development are aligned exactly with the proposed runway and so are in the flight patch of aircraft leaving or arriving the airport.

The controllers at La Mercy Airport have been among those watching the millions of birds come in this year from all over eastern and western Europe. They will leave again at the onset of winter.
The threat that planes at an expanded La Mercy Airport would pose to the swallows roosting at the reedbed, among Africa’s largest roosts, was put across by conservationists and BirdLife partner organizations throughout Europe.The barn swallow, Hirundo rustica, undertakes one of the world’s most remarkable migrations. The birds fly thousands of miles from southern Africa in spring to breed in Europe and then repeat the feat in reverse in the autumn, to winter back in Africa.

“This has been a fantastic result, and we’re delighted to report on this outcome after a year of negotiations and meetings. The support of so many people via letters and petitions has played an important part.” said Neil Smith, conservation manager at BirdLife South Africa, which led the campaign.

The Airports Company of South Africa has been supportive of making accommodations for the birds.

“Since our campaign started, the Airports Company of South Africa has really come on board, quickly realizing the importance of this site as a reedbed of international significance,” said Smith.

Following BirdLife’s complaint, consultants were brought in to examine the roosting and flocking behavior of the swallows, using advanced radar imagery. They confirmed that constant monitoring of the swallow movements during take-off and landing of aircraft would be required.

The Airports Company of South Africa now says it will install in the airport control tower the same advanced radar technology that the consultants used to study the movement of the swallows.

This will mean that planes can take the option of circling or approaching from another angle when large flocks of swallows form over the reedbed site in the late evening.

Environmental management staff will be employed to make sure that suitable management of the reedbed continues, the airports company said.

Bird conservationists feel somewhat reassured about the swallows’ future. “Losing such a valuable site could have affected breeding swallow populations across Europe,” said Dr. Ian Burfield, Birdlife’s European research and database manager.

“Conserving migratory birds is about more than ensuring one site is protected or well managed,” said Burfield. “It takes global effort: at breeding sites, at stopover sites during migration, and at important non-breeding sites like this, where large numbers of birds roost.

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