King Lear IV.i.74-82
A reparation
[GLOUCESTER Here, take this purse, thou whom the heavens’ plagues Have humbled to all strokes. That I am wretched Makes thee the happier. Heavens, deal so still: Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, That slaves your ordinance, that will not see Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly. So distribution should undo excess And each man have enough.] Dost thou know Dover? EDGAR Ay, master. GLOUCESTER There is a cliff, whose high and bending head Looks fearfully in the confined deep. Bring me but to the very brim of it, And I’ll repair the misery thou dost bear With something rich about me. From that place I shall no leading need. EDGAR Give me thy arm. Poor Tom shall lead thee. Exeunt *****
Blind, Gloucester still speaks the language of sight. The cliff’s high and bending head looks fearfully in the confined deep. But it matters that we don’t take this as personification but catachresis — the figurative use of language when there isn’t quite a literal equivalent (the neck of a bottle, the leg of a table, a Substack post); as catachresis and also hypallage or transferred epithet: it’s fearful for us to look down from the top of the cliff. Although the language calls back a little to Lear’s self-description when he calls the elements
servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engendered battles ’gainst a head
So old and white as this,
the whiteness of his head has now become the whiteness of the cliffs. Gloucester’s catachrestic language depersonalizes, and is part of the depersonalization of the gods and of the world that imbues the last two acts
Nature in Lear stands on the very verge of his confine, Regan had said; here it’s the deep that is confined by the land but the reversal doesn’t make a difference. All that matters is a border or brim1 that isn’t one any longer (as we’ll see), since the borders that the superlative marks are gone. Gloucester offers to repair the misery Tom bears — misery that means both Tom’s poverty and the depersonalized Gloucester himself who is the misery Tom must now bear to Dover — with “Something rich about me”, which has (for me) the effect of a strange combination of hyperbole and understatement.2
“Give me thy arm” Tom says, an offer Shakespeare sets up here to sensitize us to its amazing repetition at the supposed cliff top (in IV.vi) — an offer which suggests the return of contact and intimacy between Edgar and Gloucester, but with an eerie otherness, as Tom substitutes for Edgar, even though Edgar has also come into Gloucester’s mind.
And now poor Tom shall lead Gloucester where (he thinks) he shall no leading need. It’s worth noting that we might very well guess that Gloucester intends suicide, but perhaps we might not. Dover is where the forces of France are landing, and it makes sense (if we don’t think about it) that this should be Gloucester’s goal.
A word I can’t help associating with Henry James, in particular with the thought that Maggie ascribes to Charlotte in The Golden Bowl: “Ours was everything a relation could be, filled to the brim with the wine of consciousness; and if it was to have no meaning, no better meaning than that such a creature as you could breathe upon it, at your hour, for blight, why was I myself dealt with all for deception? why condemned after a couple of short years to find the golden flame—oh, the golden flame!—a mere handful of black ashes?” In the romance that may be a distant ancestor of The Golden Bowl Antony tells Cleopatra:
To the boy Caesar send this grizzled head,
And he will fill thy wishes to the brim
With principalities. (III.xiii.21-23)
The nearly unnoticeable rhyme — I’ll rePAIR the misery thou dost BEAR — has the same effect, I think. When doing metrical analysis, when thinking how to perform a line, it’s always relevant to be aware (sorry!) of the relative stresses of all syllables, and certainly of all stressed syllables. BEAR is more stressed than rePAIR. The reparation is less than, more minimal than, what it repairs but it’s still… there.
"Give me thy arm," isn't just remarkable and palpable, and discourse-worthy -- whereas placed as it is, almost does this great funnel-work of distilled recompense. Akin to what Auden ('54) does with Hephaestus and "or one could weep because another wept" and "at what the God had wrought to please her son" for returns various, conjoining all the poem's/epic's/play's characters; a hard funnelling of sorts. Edgar and his leadership speak and move, action matches a wisdom in brevity's directive incisionary and non-talk. In a play of countless wrong gestures and missteps, it is more than relieving and affirmative.
(Whisking the entire 'gestural and anti-gestural' aspects of the tragedy. All 'Lear wants' so rigidly from Act 1 and on (and can't count to a hundred to satisfy his accounting of non-numerical emotions) (the knights are hilarious) and its tragic embodiments. All into for syllables; "[g]ive me thy arm," that is, if only (*IF ONLY) Cordelia led with that instead of nothing.)
This is lovely; thank you for this manner of learning in which you've expressed *this here*: "the misery Tom bears — misery that means both Tom’s poverty and the depersonalized Gloucester himself who is the misery Tom must now bear to Dover — with “Something rich about me”, which has (for me) the effect of a strange combination of hyperbole and understatement."
It yields (a current yield, if you will) ... in both a very timely and practical life-lesson, and, as a keener sense of exactly whom Gloucester has become, can muster of himself, and, "withers/entropies" into (over the full-course of the rapid, pace-making action). Tom's rapidity in pilgrimage (Peck) Christian, indeed shows the negative space underscoring the reverse-coming-of-age in Gloucester-&-Lear with their decayed whenever/wherever 'fall-into-schmati'em'.
If, whoever said, that Lady Macbeth was entirely drunk keeping warm in that castle the length of the play, (I don't recall(?)...) -- is onto the wrong tree bark; then, perhaps we might at best grant Gloucester mercy and obligatory credentials for his endurance (titiksha; forbearance) before the age of antibiotics.