In this sequence of poems, Sahibzadi Imtiaz illuminates core traits and motivations of three major characters from The Tempest. The form of the poems varies little: both Miranda’s poem and Prospero’s adhere to a similar rhyme scheme and rhythm, while Ariel’s poem, like Ariel’s songs in The Tempest, escapes the rigid confines that contain the other characters’ speech. However, Imtiaz distinguishes between the characters visually by selecting fonts to represent each distinct personality. In this way, the fonts take on the responsibility for inflection that would typically be entrusted to actors in a performance.

By giving each character space to express themselves, Imtiaz offers an informal analysis of the complex motivations that underly their overt actions. Couplets in “The Story of Prospero” (cherished/perished, for example), reveal the narrator’s focus on family and feeling of betrayal as prime motivators behind his overt interest in worldly and magical power. Miranda’s focus on the environment in “A Cage” reveal both her feelings of isolation and a sense of absence from her own life. (How heartbreaking to know that her “escape” with Ferdinand was engineered by the father who has caged her all along!) Ariel’s insistent refrain “I am…” ironically reveals the character’s struggle to declare his own existence, in a telling twist on the character’s reliance on the passive voice in The Tempest.

None of the poems in this series use punctuation to end or separate thoughts. Instead, line breaks function to guide the reader. But because each poem lacks a final punctuation mark, Imtiaz is able to convey a sense that the poem might continue beyond what we read on the page. In this way, Imtiaz borrow from the utopian literary traditions we have studied in class, as well as from the inconclusive endings of both The Tempest and A Tempest.

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