Question

The hollow crown poem line by line explanation

Answer 1

Explanation:

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Answer 2

The hollow crown poem line by line explanation

• The hollow crown poem is a soliloquy of King Richard II, in the drama Richard II by Shakespeare.

• In this poem the great king philosophises on the condition of human beings.  King Richard invites every man to come and talk of his life which will ultimately bear only the epitaph on his tomb as death will finish it all. Death spares no one. All human bodies are ultimately changed to dust.

• Nothing is left of the body and the pleasures and pains it has withstood. Every King has to die in spite of the achievements he has performed or the deadly deeds he has committed. Every legal will, battle, murder, usurping or tyranny ultimately is silenced by death.

• He laments that he and his men have lost all to his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke. Nothing belongs to Richard anymore. His crown, kingdom, possession have all been usurped by Henry. What remains is just a lump of earth that will bury him as his only possession is death.  

• He urges his men and bids them in the name of God to sit and talk of the various ways kings have died in the past by various unfair means. Some have been good kings who have been unjustly killed while some were tyrants who had mercilessly murdered men whose ghosts haunted them to death.

• Ultimately what remains behind is the hollow crown that sits firmly round the forehead of the king whilst death laughs slyly at the false pride and vagaries nurtured by the vain and befallen kings.

• The foolish mind never sees through the truth of life. Kings think that there thrones are secured and their lives are impenetrable like brass and cannot be touched. But death destroys all. So the King now confesses he is as plain and simple as a common man.

• There is no difference between him and others. He too will suffer the same fate as others in the hands of death. So the poem ends with the rhetorical question that how can he be  called a king.