Puck

Randall Duk Kim, as Puck, in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Puck am I, and only that,

Shameless, light and mischievous,

I whose antic air no one

Seeks beyond the comic age

Which I parody on stage.

There is nothing serious,

Yet I feel the sudden hush

After everyone has left.

None but I can hear my own

Hollow laughter echo through

Mock reality and doubt.

Then a melancholic rush

Overwhelms the figure who

By his self-indulgence made

Gaiety a wreckless state.

Truths incline to irony,

And I exit now without

Any love or company.

Puck, after WH Auden © Ron Villejo

More than 30 years ago now, I traveled to the American's Player Theater in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and feasted on Shakespeare in the wooded outdoors over two or three summers.  One of my best memories was the performance of Randall Duk Kim as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  That was summer of 1980, and in November that year I wrote my poem.  There must've been something in that APT production that prompted me to write a darker, melancholic Puck.  Or maybe it was just my mood at the time, but my poetry professor Mary Kinzie at Northwestern University loved the poem.  It was this poem that she said Auden had a liberating effect on me.