Gazetteer

 The owned shared names that bind us and settle

Make London Athens for an hour or three.

Each field, forest, stream, street, home memory

Whether tempest landscape, or hand with a petal.

Names half-remembered moonee in the ponds,

Queenscliffe by riptide and corangamite

Inhabit us who inhabit their well worn sites

Through the breathing space that is our bond.

Let’s break from the caught world a day or three

To rehearse lines in secret, a brand new play

By the esteemed if shaky changer of names!

Let’s fool with the form of things and play games

With how love has worked since veriest day

When happily ownsomes birthed stagg’ringly free!

 

The brilliant speech at the opening of Act V includes the famous lines: "And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name", and not just the pen but more especially the memory that wishes to remember. Naming is one underlying interest of the play. Queenscliffe, verb, to name a cliff after a queen. Corangamite, noun, salty water. The sonnet is inspired by the idea of the players escaping town to practise their play in the forest, where they can concentrate in a dedicated space, but also where no one can steal their ideas. Doubtless Shakespeare's troupes would do this, though exactly why anyone would want to steal the ideas for 'Pyramus and Thisbe' is left fairly much up in the air.