Welcome to Resounding Verse, a podcast about poetry and song.

“They bore him barefaced on the bier,” a song by Ophelia from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
And in his grave rain’d many a tear:—
Fare you well, my dove!

And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead:
Go to thy death-bed:
He never will come again.

His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll:
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan:
God ha’ mercy on his soul!

This text comes from Act 4, Scene 5 of Hamlet, after Ophelia’s father, Polonius, has been killed by Hamlet. When Ophelia appears at court, her speech has become fragmented. She moves between ordinary speech and bits of song, between memories, riddles, and images of death. The people around her keep trying to figure out what exactly she means.

The text begins with the image of a funeral:

They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
And in his grave rain’d many a tear:—
Fare you well, my dove!

The bier, spelled B-I-E-R, is the frame on which a corpse is carried to burial. So the opening gives us a starkly physical image of a dead man being carried to his grave.

And Shakespeare intensifies that image through sound—through the sheer sound of the language: “bore him barefaced on the bier.” Those strong B sounds—“bore him,” “barefaced,” “bier”—packed closely together, sound almost like the tolling of a death knell.

Then comes the line “Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny,” this conventional string of nonsense syllables, strangely inserted between the image of the corpse and the tears that are raining into his grave.

That kind of collision between high and low, between song and more conventionally poetic language, is characteristic of Ophelia’s speeches. Throughout the scene, things that seem as though they shouldn’t belong together keep rubbing up against one another: funeral imagery and bawdy ballads, prayer and nonsense, intensely personal memories and scraps of familiar song like “Hey non nonny.”

The literary critic Elaine Showalter has written about the verbal freedom that Ophelia acquires in her madness, in these songs that give voice to experiences that had previously been difficult or impossible for her to express.

Here, even within just these opening lines, Shakespeare makes different expressive worlds collide. The jaunty “Hey nonny” refrain sounds out of place between a corpse and a grave. And that wrongness is part of what makes the scene so unsettling.

But something else happens at the end of this part of the text. And it doesn’t have to do with high and low, or different worlds colliding. It has to do with something so simple as pronouns.

The first three lines describe the dead man in the third person: “him,” “his.”

They bore him barefaced on the bier
And in his grave rain’d many a tear.

Then suddenly Ophelia turns toward him and addresses him in the second person:

Fare you well, my dove!

The song, in other words, shifts from talking about the dead man to speaking to him.

And who is this man? Who is “my dove”?

On first glance, it would seem to be Polonius, Ophelia’s father. He, after all, is the object of her grief. But “my dove” is the language of intimacy, perhaps even of someone speaking to a lover.

Throughout this scene, grief for Polonius and grief over Hamlet seem difficult to separate. One man, her father, is dead. The other, her lover, has disappeared from her life. And the song leaves both losses hovering around that pronoun: “him.”

The next lines make this loss much more direct:

And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead:
Go to thy death-bed:
He never will come again.

What strikes me here is the amount of repetition in these lines. The question is asked twice: “And will he not come again? And will he not come again?”

And the answer begins with repetition too: “No, no, he is dead.”

And then essentially the same fact is stated again: “He is dead. He never will come again.”

It’s as though the language has temporarily broken out of a poetic mold. The first part of the text gives us poetic images: a bier, a grave, raining tears, a dove. This is the more or less conventional language of poetry.

But here the language becomes almost brutally literal, with a bluntness, a plainness. This is the language that you might use if you were reckoning with a sudden loss and didn’t have poetic words to describe it, but just the plainest of words that capture the visceralness of what you’re feeling.

Will he come again?

No. He is dead.

He never will come again.

And then there is that strange command: “Go to thy death-bed.”

Once again, the pronouns turn outward here. “He,” describing the dead man, becomes “you,” just as was the case before with “Fare you well, my dove.”

This line, “Go to thy death-bed,” also has an ambiguous addressee. It’s not clear who “thou” is, who “you” is. It, of course, could be Hamlet or Polonius. But in some sense, it seems as though it may be Ophelia herself, because we remember that she takes her own life later: “Go to thy death-bed.”

She may also be referring to the people in the scene, or to all of us, who will ultimately go to our deathbeds.

Then come the final lines of text:

His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll:
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan:
God ha’ mercy on his soul!

Now Ophelia fixes on the dead man’s physical appearance. His beard is white, his hair is pale.

And I find this moment especially heartbreaking because it’s so specific. Grief suddenly stops being about death in the abstract—our deathbeds and the like—and becomes a picture of this person: a white beard, pale hair, the remembered face of someone that she knew.

But she can’t hold onto that image for long. Almost immediately, just when it appears, it vanishes, and the realization returns, again expressed in the plainest possible language:

He is gone, he is gone.

And from that intensely private moment, the text begins to widen outward again, as we’ve seen multiple times. And here we have a new pronoun:

And we cast away moan:
God ha’ mercy on his soul!

This is the first appearance of “we.” Until now, the text has moved between the absent “he” and the “you” whom Ophelia addresses. But suddenly the mourning becomes communal.

That little pronoun “we” draws other people into the song—the people standing around Ophelia, perhaps, but also potentially all of us who hear this song. Her grief is no longer hers alone.

And the final line then widens the frame even more, moving from personal recollection into the conventional language of prayer:

God ha’ mercy on his soul!

In just a few lines, the song moves from the remembered details of one man’s body, to the fact of his absence, to a community of mourners, and finally, to God.

“They bore him barefaced on the bier,” a song by Ophelia from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
And in his grave rain’d many a tear:—
Fare you well, my dove!

And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead:
Go to thy death-bed:
He never will come again.

His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll:
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan:
God ha’ mercy on his soul!

And now here is a musical setting of this text by Cheryl Frances-Hoad.

[Song performance]

Cheryl Frances-Hoad is a British composer whose music ranges across many genres: opera, orchestral music, chamber music, choral music, and song. She trained first as a cellist and pianist at the Yehudi Menuhin School and later studied at Cambridge and King’s College London.

The song “They Bore Him Barefaced on the Bier” comes from a set called Two Shakespeare Songs, which was published in 2014. The other song in the pair, by the way, is called “Tomorrow Is St. Valentine’s Day,” and it also sets words sung by Ophelia in Act 4, Scene 5 of Hamlet.

The recording comes from soprano Ruby Hughes’s 2026 album Amidst the Shades, an album built around English song from the Elizabethan period to the present day. The CD begins with John Dowland and other early English composers, such as Robert Johnson and Henry Purcell, and eventually moves into recent Shakespeare settings by Errollyn Wallen, Deborah Pritchard, and Cheryl Frances-Hoad.

Frances-Hoad originally wrote the song for voice and piano, but on Amidst the Shades, the lutenist Jonas Nordberg has arranged the piano part for lute, placing this twenty-first-century Shakespeare setting alongside the sound world of the much earlier lute songs that surround it on the album.

This song begins with a short introduction, just with the lute, that sounds a little like a dance. But it’s a strange, off-kilter, slow dance.

Part of that strangeness comes from the meter that Cheryl Frances-Hoad uses. You might expect a lilting tune like this to fall into a 6/8 meter, and it would sound like this:

[Musical demonstration]

One, two, three, four, five, six.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
One, two, three, four, five, six.

But instead, Frances-Hoad writes the song in a 5/8 meter:

One, two, three, four, five.
One, two, three, four, five.
One, two, three, four, five.
One, two, three, four, five.

The introduction also sounds out of joint because of the harmony. The melody itself is basically entirely diatonic. It fits perfectly into a C-minor key.

And here’s just the main part of the melody itself.

[Musical demonstration]

This could easily be the melody of a folk song, something suggested by those words “Hey nonny, nonny.”

And what I’m going to do is play that melody and harmonize it much more normally, and make it fit entirely within C minor.

[Musical demonstration]

But that’s not what Frances-Hoad does. She writes pitches in the lower part of this texture that rub against the melody.

The result is kind of like a folk dance gone wrong.

And recall what I said about the wrongness of the language that Ophelia uses. We hear that wrongness in the musical material that Cheryl Frances-Hoad uses as well.

The introduction’s music forms the basis for the rest of the song. That phrase is repeated over and over again.

However, it changes at striking moments. And the first of those moments comes at the end of the first chunk of text, on that line “Fare you well, my dove,” when we have a change from third-person pronouns—“him,” “his”—to that second-person pronoun, “you.”

On this line, the music turns from C minor to C major.

[Musical excerpt]

It’s as though the lute registers that shift toward tenderness and intimacy.

But the shift to major, like the shift to a “you” pronoun, doesn’t last.

And you can hear that already, even in the passage we just heard, where the lute sounds first an E-natural, then an E-flat, and then back to E-natural. It’s as though it’s ambivalent. It can’t quite decide what mode it wants to be in.

C minor does return fully at the beginning of the next section, and with it the previous accompanimental pattern.

Now, though, the voice seems to pull away from it. The lute starts that familiar phrase, but the voice enters late, almost as though it’s lost its place.

And then the melody begins to fixate on small fragments. As the words repeat, the music repeats too:

And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?

The melody seems unable to move on because Ophelia herself can’t move past that question.

[Musical excerpt]

And then, without warning, the accompaniment stops, leaving the voice alone, singing those words:

He is dead.

[Musical excerpt]

It’s as though the shock of that moment of recognition—“he is dead”—causes everything to stop.

And it stays stopped. We hear, after this, only the singer for five full measures.

The music moves away from song, from something resembling folk song, and toward something much more like recitative, the kind of writing that composers have long used when they set music to approach the rhythms and directness of speech.

Here is Ophelia speaking to herself, inwardly.

Fittingly, this recitative passage is also the one moment in the song where the vocal melody becomes chromatic and begins to pull away from the key of the song.

Previously, her melody stayed within the notes of the scale, even if the lute accompaniment didn’t. But here it slips outside them, not tethered to anything—not rhythm, not meter, not even the tonal world of the song.

[Musical excerpt]

All of those things that were abandoned in that moment where time stops—meter, rhythm, tonality, a familiar accompaniment—return for the final lines of the text:

His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll:
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan:
God ha’ mercy on his soul!

But, as you’ll hear in a moment, the accompaniment has changed.

A lot of what happens in this song is repetition with slight and powerful change. Here, the accompaniment starts in the wrong key, and then it returns to the right key, but it’s in the wrong register, and so on.

The easiest way to hear how these changes happen is to listen to the passage and keep your attention on the lute, and on the way the familiar little dance tune keeps coming back, but never in quite the same way.

Here is the passage with the vocal melody removed. You’ll just hear the lute. And I’ll comment a little bit as it plays, just so you can hear how things shift.

[Musical excerpt]

So here we’re in the wrong key. Happens to be A-flat major instead of C minor.

[Musical excerpt continues]

We stay in that wrong key.

[Musical excerpt continues]

We’re back in C minor, but the lute is an octave too low.

[Musical excerpt continues]

Now we’re back in the right octave, but with some weird notes.

The way I’ve come to hear this, as I’ve paid more and more attention to what’s happening in the lute, is that the song never really puts itself back together.

The lute returns to its opening pattern, and Ophelia returns to something resembling song after that long recitative passage. But the rupture we heard in the middle of the song—that outpouring of grief, almost spoken grief—has changed everything that comes after it.

Here’s that passage once more, the one you just heard, with the voice part added back in.

[Musical excerpt]

And as you just heard, on the final words, “God ha’ mercy on his soul,” the accompaniment disappears once more.

The melody returns to what we heard earlier on “No, no, he is dead.” But that blunt fact of death is transformed into a quiet prayer.

Here once more is Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s “They Bore Him Barefaced on the Bier.”

[Song performance]

Many thanks to Cheryl Frances-Hoad, and also to Naxos Records and Jonas Nordberg, the lutenist who did this arrangement, for giving me permission to use this recording of the song.

To listen and subscribe to the podcast, go to resoundingverse.com. And if you like what you’ve heard, I hope you’ll consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, or even sharing this episode with someone who you think will also enjoy this music.

Resounding Verse is produced by me, Stephen Rodgers.

Thank you for listening.