Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, October 29th, 2004.

Today is the birthday of my second son, Graham, and he is possibly my wittiest child,

so I thought I would mark the occasion with some ironic fatherly advice.

This is Polonius's advice to his son Laertes from Act 1, Scene 3 of Hamlet.

And it's ironic because while this is really on paper some of the best fatherly advice given in English poetry,

it is unfortunately overshadowed by the failings of the terrible father who gives this advice and does not seem to live by it himself. And while I will be

the first to admit that few fathers are able to consistently live out the advice they give to their

children, Polonius is an exceptional failure in this

category. There is another tangential form of irony attached to this poetic passage from Hamlet,

one that always saddens me when I think about it, and that is the very common misinterpretation

of one of the last lines, to thine own self be true,

which I have not only heard misquoted and misapplied on numerous occasions,

but I have also seen tattooed onto people who seem to think that having this fairly unoriginal

sentiment, Shakespeare came up with it, not them,

after all, right?

Permanently imprinted on themselves is the way to be true to something unique in and about

themselves.

But even then, I think they mistake the original sentiment.

To Polonius' credit, what he means, and we can see it in the line that follows is

not to find some authentic essential element within you and labor at every moment to give it full

expression but rather not to tell yourself lies to to be true to yourself, to be honest with yourself,

...