Ophelia has been drowned so often in art that Mike Stone's poem can simply trust us to know her. In Shakespeare's *Hamlet* she dies in a brook, her clothes spread out around her. Stone moves her to the Avon, the river of Stratford, Shakespeare's own town. The shift seems to fold the character back into the world of the man who wrote her. The poem is a short sequence of images, a drowning painted in four lines, followed by an abrupt human reaction. Its central idea is the clash between a tragedy turned into something lovely and the plain, awkward response of someone looking at it.
The first four lines work almost like a painting because they have no main verb. "Flowing," "looking," "collapsing" and "billowing" are all participles, so nothing begins or ends. The image hangs in a continuous present. The details are strange and slightly dreamlike. Green hair suggests river weed more than a person, as if Ophelia is already turning into the water. "Looking out from swimming eyes" can be read two ways: eyes that are brimming with tears, or eyes that are themselves adrift in the river. With no comma to settle it, the line stays ambiguous. By the last line of the stanza her skirts billow "in the mists" rather than in water, so she seems to be dissolving into the air around her.
The oddest image is "The bridge collapsing into suicides." A bridge is where people jump from, but here it gives way and turns into the deaths themselves. The word "suicides" is plural and abstract, and it widens one literary drowning into something larger and less manageable. The grammar adds to the effect, since a structure collapses "into" a category of people. It is a surreal leap, and the poem does not explain it. The near-echo between "eyes" and "suicides" connects the two lines by sound. Otherwise there is no regular rhyme or metre, and the long, loose lines have a drifting rhythm that suits their subject.
Then comes "I laugh." It is the poem's first finite verb, its first "I," and its first full stop. The change is sudden, and the stanza break leaves the line alone on the page. The reader has to decide what the laugh means. It could be nervous laughter, a reaction to a scene that has become too theatrical. It could be callousness, or the speaker's refusal to join in the sentimental mourning that Ophelia's image usually invites. The poem never says, and that ambiguity is where it is most alive.
The last two stanzas shrink further. "The magpie flies" has four syllables and a plain, matter-of-fact verb. In English folklore the magpie is tied to a counting rhyme ("one for sorrow"), and a single bird would fit that tradition. The poem does not insist on it, so this reading is only an inference. Still, the bird flies on regardless. The final line, "The yellow primrose," has no verb at all, which brings us back to the frozen, painterly mode of the opening. Yet the picture has changed. The green of the hair becomes the yellow of a small, ordinary spring flower. There may be a quiet echo of Ophelia's own words in *Hamlet*, where she mentions "the primrose path of dalliance." If the echo is intended, the flower ends the poem by pointing back to the character who has just disappeared from it.
What makes the poem interesting is how much it does in so few words. In about thirty words it takes one of literature's most familiar deaths, strips away the explanation, and sets the beautiful image against a human reaction that refuses to be beautiful. The collapsing bridge, the laugh, the bird and the flower follow one another with no connecting logic, much as a mind jumps from one thing to another after a shock. The poem leaves the reader to decide whether the laugh is cruel, defensive or honest, and whether the primrose at the end offers comfort or just the world's indifference.