Genevieve Taggard’s “Little Hamlet” is a study in suspended feeling. Taggard, an American poet who published in the 1920s and moved through the same Greenwich Village circles as many political and literary modernists, often wrote about emotional states with unsentimental clarity. The poem first appeared in her 1922 collection *For Eager Lovers*, at a moment when poets were compressing large feelings into small, precise images. Its title shrinks Shakespeare’s indecisive prince into a “little” self-portrait, but the stakes remain large: a speaker caught between love, grief, and violence.
The poem is only eight lines, yet it creates a complete psychological knot. A voice hovers over a “you,” unable to move. The speaker describes herself hanging “like a wave, like a lover, / Like a scimitar edged with hate.” These three comparisons do not settle into one identity. A wave falls by nature; a lover leans toward the beloved; a scimitar is a curved blade that cuts. But this speaker cannot do any of these. She is “too heavy with grief to be straight,” which suggests both a physical bend and an emotional distortion. The phrase “and far” then dangles alone on its own line, as if distance is the one thing the grieving voice cannot reach. The central idea is emotional paralysis: too burdened to act, too fragile to release.
Taggard builds that paralysis into the poem’s sound and shape. The opening line repeats “Over you, over you, over,” so the first movement is not forward but suspended, like a wave that never breaks. The short lines pull the reader down quickly, yet the rhymes keep circling back: “over” and “lover,” “discover” and “lover” again, with the sharp rhyme of “hate” and “straight,” and the looser echo of “far” and “scimitar.” The line break after “straight” forces a pause before “And far,” demonstrating how hard it is for the speaker to reach any distance. The word “too” appears twice—“too heavy,” “too frail”—and that repetition forms a trap. She is too much of one thing and too little of another. The poem’s meter is not regular, but that unevenness fits a mind that cannot settle into a steady rhythm.
Imagery carries the emotional argument. A wave and a scimitar both share a curve, and the speaker imagines herself as that curve: bent by grief, sharpened by hate, yet “blue-thin” and delicate. The word “blue” does double work here, suggesting cold steel and bruised sadness. “Edged with hate” turns the lover comparison toward a weapon; the same shape that might embrace someone also threatens to cut. The verb “hang” sits against the verb “fall.” The speaker hangs, but cannot fall, because falling would mean choosing to crash like a wave, surrender like a lover, or strike like a blade. Instead she remains suspended, too heavy and too frail at once. “Discover” matters because action feels like knowledge: she cannot learn how to let go. The title “Little Hamlet” adds a self-mocking note. Hamlet also hesitates between action and inaction, between love and rage, and Taggard makes that hesitation intimate rather than grand.
The poem’s significance lies in its refusal to resolve the very tension it names. It does not choose among wave, lover, or scimitar, and neither does the speaker. That unresolved quality, packed into eight short lines, captures how grief and anger can freeze a person in place. Taggard’s language is plain but exact, and her images are at once natural and violent. “Little Hamlet” turns a familiar literary figure into a small modern voice, one that hangs over another person with all the weight of love and hurt and cannot find a way to fall. This is the poem’s lasting power: it leaves the reader, too, suspended above the ending, watching a blue-thin blade that never drops.