Ophelia

Walter De la Mare channels Ophelia's final moments with an almost unbearable tenderness. The poem reimagines her drowning not as mere tragedy but as transcendence, a woman surrendered to water and madness, her voice lost to us but her presence lingering like the flowers she gathers. The language moves with a sleepwalker's grace, every image suspended between beauty and decay, between the living and the drowned. This is Shakespeare filtered through a fever-dream, where grief becomes a kind of floating. De la Mare captures what Shakespeare could only suggest: the terrible peace of a mind finally broken free from obligation, the way madness can feel like the first honest thing. It is short, but it haunts.