This passage appears in the text quite early on, quickly giving the audience a window into Hamlet’s soul and the clockwork of his thoughts. In this the first of several of Hamlet’s soliloquies, Hamlet sets the scene as it has evolved in his mind.
Hamlet begins the passage by cursing himself for what is happening around him. He wishes that he did not exist any longer. He desires that he did not have to live in a world that would allow what is happening around him to occur. He craves for his body to dissolve into nothing, wishing that he could will his body to “thaw and resolve itself into dew”. But since he cannot melt, he would consider suicide if God “the Everlasting” were not so against the notion. His belief is that God has his “fix’d his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!”.
Hamlet feels that things are falling apart around him. He resolves that the world is a kind of un-weeded garden, the garden itself being an allusion to the world around him. Hamlet’s world/garden “grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature”. His garden is flowered with treachery and pain, weeded by the evil King, Queen and the others. This allusion can be considered applicable to the state of Hamlet’s mind as well as to the State of Denmark. Being that Hamlet sees the State of Denmark as falling to ruin and chaos in the hands of Claudius. All after his father, who had been “so excellent a king” to the people of Denmark.
He compares his father and Claudius as being like unto a “Hyperion to a Satyr”. Hyperion being an allusion to the Greek myth of the Titans, one of the children of Uranus and Gaea. A satyr is also creature from Greek myth. Satyrs lived in the forest and mountain areas and were said to be part human, with a horse's tail and ears, and a goat's horns and legs. The allusion can be deciphered in several ways and could be applicable to the great difference in