Culture
How Netflix Took on the Magic of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’
The town of Macondo never existed. It was never supposed to. And yet, here it is.
The idyllic town in Colombia was the imaginary setting for “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the 1967 novel that helped Gabriel García Márquez win the Nobel Prize and that, over the years, led to many offers from Hollywood to create an adaptation.
The author always refused, insisting that his novel, in which the real and fantastical converge, could never be rendered onscreen. His Macondo, he said, could never be built.
But now, in a rambling field outside the city of Ibagué, stands Macondo. Built by Netflix from the ground up for the first-ever screen adaptation of the novel, the town has real birds nesting in its trees and dogs wandering its narrow streets.
García Márquez did not want Hollywood to make a movie from his book, his son Rodrigo García said, because he could not picture English-speaking actors playing the Buendías, the family at the center of the novel. Nor could he see the epic story being squeezed into two hours — or three, or four, for that matter.
And then there was the issue of magical realism, which the author used to conjure his experience of Latin America’s capricious, stranger-than-fiction reality.
In the novel, which opens in the 19th century, the people of Macondo marvel at things already considered ordinary elsewhere: a daguerreotype machine, magnets, ice. But no one questions the presence of a ghost — or whether a baby can be born with the tail of a pig or flowers fall like rain from the sky.
Flowers raining down on Úrsula, the matriarch of the Buendía family. Pablo Arellano/Netflix
Onscreen, magical realism has proved notoriously hard to replicate: The visual effects used to create such images in the past tipped at times into fantasy or horror, or just looked silly. The 2007 film adaptation of “Love in the Time of Cholera,” the author’s other best-known book, was a box-office flop.
But in the decade since García Márquez died, much has changed and, in a turn he could not have imagined, Netflix has been able to overcome his old objections.
For one, the streaming giant could make a big-budget adaptation of the novel in Spanish, having proved the global appeal of Latin American content with hits like “Narcos” and “Roma.”
Netflix could also make a series, not a film, giving the plot more room to stretch out. Finally, it could film it in the author’s native Colombia, with mostly Colombian actors, said Francisco Ramos, the company’s vice president of content for Latin America. Netflix could make “Cien Años de Soledad,” not “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
The author’s family said yes, and the first season, made up of eight hourlong episodes, airs on Dec. 11. The second is in progress.
García, the author’s son, said the family had agreed in part because they felt a series could produce “the sensation of having experienced 100 years of life,” which is a hallmark of the book, he said.
“That, to me, is what’s important,” he said. “It’s the total experience of immersing yourself.”
And so now, Macondo — and a studious replica of the Buendía home, sheltered beneath a hangar — have become reality.
They are so real, so immersive, in fact, that sometimes the actors aren’t sure where the fiction begins or ends.
On a recent afternoon, as the actor who plays an older Úrsula, the Buendía matriarch, prepared to shoot a scene in the kitchen, she held out an egg before cracking it on a bowl and laughed.
“Is it real, or is it fake?” asked the actor, Marleyda Soto.
The actress playing Úrsula, Marleyda Soto, and Laura Mora, the co-director of the series.
A total commitment to recreating reality, or the novel’s version of reality, would guide their work, the creators decided. With that, would they — finally — get magical realism right?
Inside Macondo
In Colombia, where García Márquez appears on the currency, many people can recite his book’s opening lines: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
In the series, the scene lets viewers see how what might appear ordinary elsewhere is often experienced as magical in Macondo, a town isolated by a dense jungle swamp near the Caribbean coast.
When ice comes to the town for the first time, it is not just a novelty, a sign of modernity, but an otherworldly spectacle. Mirroring the author’s elaborate description of the moment, and hewing closely to the text, the filmmakers create a theatrical scene in which light and shadow evoke an almost religious experience.
Seeing Ice
When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, José Arcadio Buendía ventured a murmur:
“It’s the largest diamond in the world.”
“No,” the gypsy countered. “It’s ice.”
1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa
The ice also signals the arrival of the first outsiders to Macondo. They are a troupe of gypsies who bring the esoteric knowledge — and basic scientific instruments — that charm José Arcadio, the Quixote-like family patriarch.
He eventually sets to work on alchemy, melting down his wife’s gold coins and leaving his family to fend for itself. While his head is buried in a book, one of his sons runs off with the gypsies. Later, his daughter nearly floats off in her bassinet. He casually pulls her down, more annoyed by the distraction than amazed.
Like other scenes where the impossible occurs, the moment is presented in the series without drama or fanfare, much as it is in the novel by the author.
The Floating Basket
One day Amaranta’s basket began to move by itself and made a complete turn about the room, to the consternation of Aureliano, who hurried to stop it. But his father did not get upset. He put the basket in its place and tied it to the leg of a table…
1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa
That approach was part of “visually capturing a special book,” said Alex García López, one of the first season’s two directors. “This is the culture of the Caribbean,” he said, where Catholic mysticism mingles with Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean beliefs about life and death, the body and the soul.
Portraying reality as it is experienced by the characters became the guiding vision of the project, said García López. What is familiar, what is theirs, is taken for granted; the new enchants and ultimately destroys.
That is strong social commentary. It is also playful, said García López, who is from Argentina. “It’s typical of Latin America,” he said, “to think that everything that comes from abroad is better than what we have at home.”
The next figures to bring the outside world to Macondo are a magistrate from the capital and a priest, the personification of politics and organized religion.
Against the wishes of the Buendías, they transform the town, painting houses in the blue of their political party and erecting a church. Like the gypsies, they also claim one of the family’s sons, who will head to war.
Most of the first season is devoted to telling this story.
“Ninety percent of the book, and the series, deals with Colombian history and the domestic passions and traumas of this family,” said José Rivera, the screenwriter and playwright who produced the first draft of the screenplay.
“When the magic does happen, it’s startling,” he said. “It’s gorgeous, because it falls in the middle of very everyday realism.”
A scene where Úrsula learns of the death of one of her sons is an example of magic taking place within ordinary daily life. A trickle of his blood travels through the town to reach her.
The Trickle of Blood
A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa
Úrsula is shocked not by the journey the blood has taken, but by the ominous message she sees in it. It is “her sixth sense” made visible, said García López, who directed the scene.
Flesh and Blood
To keep the production grounded in the characters’ reality, the filmmakers shot the scenes involving magical realism in front of the camera, avoiding visual effects whenever possible, said Laura Mora, who is co-directing the series.
“That had to do with a formal decision on our part,” Mora said. “‘Everything has to feel very homemade, very analog, very, very on-camera.’”
So, for example, the ghost that haunts the Buendías was not a translucent apparition made in postproduction, the directors said. He was a flesh-and-blood actor — with lots of blood.
The ghost appears repeatedly trying to staunch a bleeding wound.
Mauro González/Netflix
Likewise, the scene in which the town’s priest levitates after drinking hot chocolate was not filmed in a studio against a screen. The actor was hauled up right on the set, using ropes and harnesses.
The harness and ropes lifting the priest were removed in postproduction. Netflix
And in the memorable scene when it rains flowers, thousands of real (and plastic) flowers truly did fall from above while the cameras were rolling.
Real flowers were supplemented with flowers made using visual effects.
Netflix
Mora said the hope was that if the magical scenes looked just like the rest of the drama, they would be more convincing.
“For the actors, that was delightful, because everything was happening on the set,” Mora said. No one had to be told to imagine things that were not there, she said. “That was really beautiful.”
A Homage to Colombia
The town of Macondo embodies the commitment Netflix made to the author’s family when it got the rights to the book in 2018.
No series on this scale had been made in Colombia before. In building the town, an effort that took hundreds of workers more than a year, Netflix gave reality to a bygone world, recreating the Colombia that García Márquez had created, down to the details.
On a recent, sweltering afternoon, Bárbara Enríquez walked through Macondo, a set she helped create as one of the two production designers on the series. She pointed to a towering rubber tree, which was all that had stood in the field before.
The location was chosen in part because of this tree.
Now it was the center of a town filled with buildings modeled on architectural styles from the 19th century, she said: vernacular, Colonial, Republican. There was the book’s bordello and bar, Catarino’s, its school, hotel and church. Dozens of species of plants were shipped in by the landscape designer to recreate the flora of the Caribbean coast.
Enríquez, who designed the set for the 2018 film “Roma,” stepped into the town’s general store.
Her team scoured the country for the antique furniture on the set. She pointed to a woven basket: They commissioned Colombian craftspeople to weave them, along with hats, hammocks and the distinctive shoulder bags known as mochilas.
Hats used in the series, and the general store.
To recreate Macondo, Netflix also relied on museums, documents, researchers and historians. The costume designer used drawings made by a 19th-century traveler and a government commission to create a wardrobe of thousands of garments.
“In the end,” said Enríquez, “‘One Hundred Years’ is a homage to Colombia.”
The creative crew had to sit down for Colombian history lessons, learning about the Thousand Days’ War, the brutal civil conflict that plays a pivotal role in the first season.
The actors had to learn to speak in the regional Costeño accent, and also to write longhand, in ink, to sew and embroider. They took to calling it “The School of One Hundred Years.”
Costumes were aged on the set.
In the process, everyone on set learned that many scenes from the book that appear fantastical were part of García Márquez’s life.
In his writings, the author revealed it was his sister who, like a little girl adopted by the Buendías, ate dirt. And there really was a priest in the region who was said to levitate when he drank wine from the chalice. (García Márquez said he swapped the wine for hot chocolate because he found that more believable.)
“You realize, OK, what he’s doing here is he is narrating the stories of the world he was born into,” Mora, the director, said. “Magical realism is a name that the academics have applied.”
The cast, most of whom are Colombian like Mora, came to see the series that way, too — as a way of bringing to life not only a fiction born from one man’s imagination, but also their country’s rich, if painful, history, and its inimitable culture.
Mora, the director, used this notebook to plan shoots.
Because of the care brought to that effort, the details accumulate to make Macondo seem real, said Enríquez, the production designer. “They may not all be seen, but they can be felt.”
The first season recreates the 19th century; the second will follow Macondo into the 20th. Enríquez said she hoped the deeply researched production would work like a time machine, making Colombians say, “That’s right, it was just like that.”
In the end, “you enter into the fiction,” she said. “Everyone enters the world of the fiction, and you embrace it.”
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
‘Romola’ (1863) by George Eliot
Who knew that there’s a major George Eliot novel that neither I nor any of my friends had ever heard of?
“Romola” was Eliot’s fourth novel, published between “The Mill on the Floss” (1860) and “Middlemarch” (1870-71). If my friends and I didn’t get this particular memo, and “Romola” is familiar to every Eliot fan but us, please skip the following.
“Romola” isn’t some fluky misfire better left unmentioned in light of Eliot’s greater work. It’s her only historical novel, set in Florence during the Italian Renaissance. It embraces big subjects like power, religion, art and social upheaval, but it’s not dry or overly intellectual. Its central character is a gifted, freethinking young woman named Romola, who enters a marriage so disastrous as to make Anna Karenina’s look relatively good.
It probably matters that many of Eliot’s other books have been adapted into movies or TV series, with actors like Hugh Dancy, Ben Kingsley, Emily Watson and Rufus Sewell. The BBC may be doing even more than we thought to keep classic literature alive. (In 1924, “Romola” was made into a silent movie starring Lillian Gish. It doesn’t seem to have made much difference.)
Anthony Trollope, among others, loved “Romola.” He did, however, warn Eliot against aiming over her readers’ heads, which may help explain its obscurity.
All I can say, really, is that it’s a mystery why some great books stay with us and others don’t.
‘Quiet Dell’ (2013) by Jayne Anne Phillips
This was an Oprah Book of the Week, which probably disqualifies it from B-side status, but it’s not nearly as well known as Phillips’s debut story collection, “Black Tickets” (1979), or her most recent novel, “Night Watch” (2023), which won her a long-overdue Pulitzer Prize.
Phillips has no parallel in her use of potent, stylized language to shine a light into the darkest of corners. In “Quiet Dell,” her only true-crime novel, she’s at the height of her powers, which are particularly apparent when she aims her language laser at horrific events that actually occurred. Her gift for transforming skeevy little lives into what I can only call “Blade Runner” mythology is consistently stunning.
Consider this passage from the opening chapter of “Quiet Dell”:
“Up high the bells are ringing for everyone alive. There are silver and gold and glass bells you can see through, and sleigh bells a hundred years old. My grandmother said there was a whisper for each one dead that year, and a feather drifting for each one waiting to be born.”
The book is full of language like that — and of complex, often chillingly perverse characters. It’s a dark, underrecognized beauty.
‘Solaris’ (1961) by Stanislaw Lem
You could argue that, in America, at least, the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem didn’t produce any A-side novels. You could just as easily argue that that makes all his novels both A-side and B-side.
It’s science fiction. All right?
I love science and speculative fiction, but I know a lot of literary types who take pride in their utter lack of interest in it. I always urge those people to read “Solaris,” which might change their opinions about a vast number of popular books they dismiss as trivial. As far as I know, no one has yet taken me up on that.
“Solaris” involves the crew of a space station continuing the study of an aquatic planet that has long defied analysis by the astrophysicists of Earth. Part of what sets the book apart from a lot of other science-fiction novels is Lem’s respect for enigma. He doesn’t offer contrived explanations in an attempt to seduce readers into suspending disbelief. The crew members start to experience … manifestations? … drawn from their lives and memories. If the planet has any intentions, however, they remain mysterious. All anyone can tell is that their desires and their fears, some of which are summoned from their subconsciousness, are being received and reflected back to them so vividly that it becomes difficult to tell the real from the projected. “Solaris” has the peculiar distinction of having been made into not one but two bad movies. Read the book instead.
‘Fox 8’ (2013) by George Saunders
If one of the most significant living American writers had become hypervisible with his 2017 novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” we’d go back and read his earlier work, wouldn’t we? Yes, and we may very well have already done so with the story collections “Tenth of December” (2013) and “Pastoralia” (2000). But what if we hadn’t yet read Saunders’s 2013 novella, “Fox 8,” about an unusually intelligent fox who, by listening to a family from outside their windows at night, has learned to understand, and write, in fox-English?: “One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music! I listened to those music werds until the sun went down.”
Once Saunders became more visible to more of us, we’d want to read a book that ventures into the consciousness of a different species (novels tend to be about human beings), that maps the differences and the overlaps in human and animal consciousness, explores the effects of language on consciousness and is great fun.
We’d all have read it by now — right?
‘Between the Acts’ (1941) by Virginia Woolf
You could argue that Woolf didn’t have any B-sides, and yet it’s hard to deny that more people have read “Mrs. Dalloway” (1925) and “To the Lighthouse” (1927) than have read “The Voyage Out” (1915) or “Monday or Tuesday” (1921). Those, along with “Orlando” (1928) and “The Waves” (1931), are Woolf’s most prominent novels.
Four momentous novels is a considerable number for any writer, even a great one. That said, “Between the Acts,” her last novel, really should be considered the fifth of her significant books. The phrase “embarrassment of riches” comes to mind.
Five great novels by the same author is a lot for any reader to take on. Our reading time is finite. We won’t live long enough to read all the important books, no matter how old we get to be. I don’t expect many readers to be as devoted to Woolf as are the cohort of us who consider her to have been some sort of dark saint of literature and will snatch up any relic we can find. Fanatics like me will have read “Between the Acts” as well as “The Voyage Out,” “Monday or Tuesday” and “Flush” (1933), the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. Speaking for myself, I don’t blame anyone who hasn’t gotten to those.
I merely want to add “Between the Acts” to the A-side, lest anyone who’s either new to Woolf or a tourist in Woolf-landia fail to rank it along with the other four contenders.
As briefly as possible: It focuses on an annual village pageant that attempts to convey all of English history in a single evening. The pageant itself interweaves subtly, brilliantly, with the lives of the villagers playing the parts.
It’s one of Woolf’s most lusciously lyrical novels. And it’s a crash course, of sorts, in her genius for conjuring worlds in which the molehill matters as much as the mountain, never mind their differences in size.
It’s also the most accessible of her greatest books. It could work for some as an entry point, in more or less the way William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” (1930) can be the starter book before you go on to “The Sound and the Fury” (1929) or “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936).
As noted, there’s too much for us to read. We do the best we can.
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Literature
‘Prayer’ (1985) by Galway Kinnell
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
“I typically say Kinnell’s words at the start of my day, as I’m pedaling a traffic-laden path to my office,” says Major Jackson, 57, the author of six books of poetry, including “Razzle Dazzle” (2023). “The poem encourages a calm acceptance of the day’s events but also wants us to embrace the misapprehension and oblivion of life, to avoid probing too deeply for answers to inscrutable questions. I admire what Kinnell does with only 14 words; the repetition of ‘what,’ ‘that’ and ‘is’ would seem to limit the poem’s sentiment but, paradoxically, the poem opens widely to contain all manner of human experience. The three ‘is’es in the middle line give it a symmetry that makes its message feel part of a natural order, and even more convincing. Thanks to the skillful punctuation, pauses and staccato rhythm, a tonal quality of interior reflection emerges. Much like a haiku, it continues after its last words, lingering like the last note played on a piano that slowly fades.”
“Just as I was entering young adulthood, probably slow to claim romantic feelings, a girlfriend copied out a poem by Pablo Neruda and slipped it into an envelope with red lipstick kisses all over it. In turn, I recited this poem. It took me the remainder of that winter to memorize its lines,” says Jackson. “The poem captures the pitch of longing that defines love at its most intense. The speaker in Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet believes the poem creates the beloved, ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’ (Sonnet 18). In Rilke’s expressive declarations of yearning, the beloved remains elusive. Wherever the speaker looks or travels, she marks his world by her absence. I find this deeply moving.”
“Clifton faced many obstacles, including cancer, a kidney transplant and the loss of her husband and two of her children. Through it all, she crafted a long career as a pre-eminent American poet,” says Jackson. “Her poem ‘won’t you celebrate with me’ is a war cry, an invitation to share in her victories against life’s persistent challenges. The poem is meaningful to all who have had to stare down death in a hospital or had to bereave the passing of close relations. But, even for those who have yet to mourn life’s vicissitudes, the poem is instructive in cultivating resilience and a persevering attitude. I keep coming back to the image of the speaker’s hands and the spirit of steadying oneself in the face of unspeakable storms. She asks in a perfectly attuned gorgeously metrical line, ‘what did i see to be except myself?’”
‘Sonnet 94’ (1609) by William Shakespeare
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity.
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
“It’s one of the moments of Western consciousness,” says Frederick Seidel, 90, the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, including “So What” (2024). “Shakespeare knows and says what he knows.”
“It trombones magnificent, unbearable sorrow,” says Seidel.
“It’s smartass and bitter and bright,” says Seidel.
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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