Horatio, If I Know Myself: Hamlet's First Soliloquy Poem by Dennis Ryan

"We must talk now.Fear
is fear.But we abandon one another."
—George Oppen, "Leviathan"

Horatio, if I know myself-
this is how I greeted him
upon my return to Elsinore
following my father's death-
my true friend well met.
There is more of ethics implied in this
statement than in any other I know:
"Horatio, you are my true friend,
and to know you is to know myself,
and vice-versa; and since we are one,
you will not betray me as Polonius, Claudius,
their adjutants, and my own mother did."
There, there it is; all laid out, on the line-
to trust someone else as one trusts oneself
is the basis of all ethics. Ethics made simple.
And there I was, a serious student of religion,
one day to become king.Tell me, Horatio,
are such sentiments too naïve, too noble
for an earth-bound prince to believe?