Do the triflers MEAN to wrack their triflers?
Do they seize upon the sweet young things –
Innocent and milkfat sweet, dotted with delicate wildflowers,
And think: “I will leave that blossom in pieces. I will stress the petals across the grass crush them under foot, the stem bent and broken, roots expressed and crumpled.” ?
Doesn’t the trifler, rather, look at the vibrant flower growing in its meadow and think: “Wouldn’t that flower look nice on my kitchen table? I have just the vase for that pretty thing.”
And he breaks the stem, plucks it from its house and places it in some water
where it looks beautiful for a few days. Then withers, rots and dies.
The wracking isn’t something a trifler meant to do – it’s usually a by-product of the careless plucking of flowers.

And now I would like to be an etymologist,
I slip back in time and dive head first into linguistics
As a young academic, toying with words, exploring them, following them through history, watching them expand and contract and shift their meanings, slipping off their significance like a robe
changing colors like chameleons
Or a mammal that has a white winter coat and exchanges it for brown in spring. I watch words like an evolutionary biologist watches Argentine Ants. I watch them fight, travel across continents, settle and colonize.
I spend years just pulling on the thread of “quote” hand over hand, following its path wheresoever it leads.

I have seen my fair share of madness.
Madness has moved through my life
With the regularity of a planet in its orbit, sometimes
it’s quite close and its influence is strong –
At others, the madness passes at a distance – just the bright glimmer of Venus –
Which could almost be mistaken for a star.
Of the madness that I have seen,
None would have been provoked by a letter returned
Or a door closed.
The causes have always been deeper,
More dramatic, more outrageous
Or decidedly less so,
Sometimes there appears to be no cause at all –
Just a sudden shift in the brain
That turns the world upside down –
First for the “mad” one,
Then for the people around him.
A change in the wind,
A date on the calendar,
The loss of a child or the hope of one
The sound of a whistle
Are all as likely to trigger madness
And perhaps as likely to end it.

Has Ophelia ever given anyone any hard words?
She is all down and flowers, all compliance and pliability. She seems to have no rough edges (though surely they’ve just been sanded down to turn a square into a circle.)
She is custard and cream, a thick rice pudding with cinnamon and raisins on top.
She is a throw pillow, a ripe peach, a small nosegay of violets wrapped in ribbon.
Her words are feathers, dandelion seeds floating on a breeze, flour billowing into the air above the sifting, butterflies alighting on leaves, silk on silk sliding.

Now he says it. Now he notices his daughters feelings!
Well, this isn’t realistic at all. I’ve never seen a man dive right into action and then realize he needs to acknowledge the feelings of the woman in front of him. Never happens. Nope.
At least, though, he does apologize. Or sympathize. Whatever he’s doing here. And I suddenly want to do a search through the canon to see who else in the plays says sorry. How many apologies are there in Shakespeare? How many sorrys?
There are 90 in the canon. And there are 4 in the play.
It redeems Polonius a bit. He’ll say it twice in this scene.

Reaching back into my memory. I tried to find a moment where the ecstasy of love had violent property in my own loving.
There was one desperate night full of desperate undertakings – one I am trying not to turn to, to remember.

I thought I could avoid it, then I remembered hearing this very line in a powerfully potent way just days after the event. The actor playing Ophelia had been sent home and we all heard the play differently with her replacement. The story is bound to rise up in these lines in little bits, if not in its totality – but the headline was:

Ophelia, heartbroken from an affair with Claudius and body wracked from an abortion, goes mad when Gertrude hooks up with Claudius.
Violent Properties: fire, glass, pills, locks, hotlines, police
Desperate Undertakings: The same.

I’m sorry, but what sort of father, after his daughter comes to him traumatized (so affrighted!) decides to go talk to his boss? His first thought is to take his trembling daughter to the King? This would benefit Ophelia how? Seems to me that this would benefit Polonius himself in giving him an in with Claudius. He’ll give him the paternal impulse to do something first. Many a father might want to spring into action in response to a crying daughter. But to the king? I don’t know about that. The fathers I know would be more inclined to go have some words with the man who made their daughters cry. They’d go talk to Hamlet himself if they were concerned with their girls. The king? Ophelia never seems more of a pawn in his game than here. Does he deserve her devotion? Her subsequent madness?

Don’t tell the Cool Police, but I listened to a lot of Peter, Paul and Mary as a teenager. They had a song that went “Come and go with me to that land, come and go with me to that land, come and go with me to that land where I’m bound.” There wasn’t much else to it. Just, come, go, land, with, me. I liked it a lot. It had a forward momentum that made me want to come, go with them to that land, wherever it was they were bound. And maybe clap my hands while I went there.
I like how coming and going mean opposite things and yet when you put them together like this, they’re perfectly matched in meaning. That’s a neat linguistic trick.