OPHELIA (Sings.)
How should I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff
And his sandal shoon.
GERTRUDE Alas, sweet lady, what imports this song?
OPHELIA Say you? Nay, pray you, mark.
(Sings.)
He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone.
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
O ho! (4.5.23-33)
So many possibilities with these song fragments: snatches of recognisable tunes, pathetic keening, frantic howling, angry shouting. But however they’re performed, they all speak of loss, abandonment, betrayal, death: how should I your true love know from another one? It’s a reasonable question, how to identify a true lover, and how to tell him apart from other lovers too. The true lover will apparently be love’s pilgrim, identifiable by his cockle hat and staff and his sandal shoon, his hat badged with the scallop shell of the pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela, a walking staff in his hand, and sandals on his feet. One and shoon might rhyme but they don’t really, and in modern pronunciation the effect is jarring. Gertrude’s flummoxed: alas, sweet lady, what imports this song? It’s bafflement, rather than what the hell are you on about, probably, but Ophelia’s just getting started: say you? I’m sorry, did you want to say something? Nay, pray you, mark. You listen to me; you listen carefully.
Now the song’s key shift, from the cruel lover to the dead loved one, here to be identified mostly with Polonius: he is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone. Dead and gone, an unsparing, unflinching finality—and he’s buried too, at his head a grass-green turf (the interjection of bright colour is shocking, its expression odd, is this a grassy turf, a piece of sod, or is this a kind of simulacrum?) and at his heels a stone. It’s topsy-turvy, preposterous, for the stone should be at the head, but here the inversion suggests disorder, utter wrongness. Even this burial’s wrong, never mind the death itself. O ho! A sigh, a scream, a groan.