“Thou map of woe, that dost talk in signs”: The Speaker-Listener Dialogue of Poetry and the Practice of Selecting Poems for Poetry Therapy

Abstract

Shakespeare's Lavinia of Titus Andronicus not only embodies the physical wounds given Procne and Philomel of Greek myth; she is Shakespeare's metaphor for the wounds of division—the map of woe—between spoken and written word. As a person, she is disenfranchised from her language community. As a poem, she talks in signs—the compressed and silent gestures beneath human speech. As a person in the poem, she is both poet and agent of healing. This study focuses upon healing Lavinia's wounds: the cut tongue and severed hands. With respect to Lavinia, the archetypal poet and person in the poem, two criteria are derived for selecting poems to serve her poem-making/healing process and the dialogue of self-realization: 1) a poem's capacity to sustain her rapture—her wonder and patience—as this passion sustains the play-spirit with its primary motive of moral constraint against harm and 2) a poem's capacity to shape a house of consciousness for the particular movement within the psychodynamic model for therapeutic action—a house of consciousness with which Lavinia may identify and to which she may accommodate.