Portrait of Prince Hamlet

The gallery in Elsinore is crowded
with regal portraits, floor to ceiling, stairwell
to windows; all the faces seem the same,
all cloaked in the barbaric furs of might.
But at the gallery’s dark northern end
a likeness hangs of young Prince Hamlet, painted
a week before he left for Wittenberg.
Fresh-faced and brashly academic, he
stands out from the ancestral gloom, his look
as fixed as theirs yet somehow everywhere:
as if his eyes both take in and create
the light, as if he lives beyond the frame,
as if the canvas is a mirror and
the picture’s not of Hamlet but of those
who turn and see him and return his gaze.
To be transfixed within a painted eye
is suddenly to feel the gilded frame
fit snugly round the borders of one’s life,
and see the layers of varnish one has daubed
upon the self begin to crack and peel.
Ambassadors and supplicants must walk
through here to meet the new King Fortinbras:
and, passing by, many a glance alights
upon the prince’s image in the shadows.
It is the only portrait that survives.

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