Kanaalaq

Kanaalaq

Kanaalaq came and bore me kisses
From bright blue skies where heaven’s bliss is …
To me, a loveless, lonely mortal,
Descended she from heaven’s portal!

She passed my flesh to reach my spirit-
Bestowing love as she drew near it;
And merging, merging like the mystic,
Grew one with me unhedonistic.

In passions steeped we intermingled-
Our souls with one another tingled-
Til we were one, and we were captured
In deep elation, deeply raptured.

The bliss brought existential numbing-
And climax rapidly was coming:
Nirvana’s otherworldly feeling
Consumed my being and had me reeling!

All hint of night had fled off frightened,
And I, within this bliss, enlightened
Felt truly happy with this creature:
“O never leave” I did beseech her.

She dwells here still (my heart is grateful),
This goddess- loving, gorgeous, faithful.
She fills me too with true renewal …
Kanaalaq, ah, my lovely jewel.

-jwm

Under the Influence of Yeats

A year ago* I placed a journal entry referring to a poem I read by Yeats. The poem is called The Song of Wandering Aengus, and it influenced me so much so that not only would I adopt tetrameter as my own standard meter, but the rhyme scheme and stanza type would be sprinkled throughout my own works.

In fact, A Memory of Delta D.O.C. (a poem of true events) was the very first experimental stanza I wrote after having read Yeats' poem. I immediately felt comfort using these poetic parameters.

*****

A Memory of Delta D.O.C.

I left the buildings for the brink-
For Delta’s wretched grounds below-
To interface with others jailed,
When to delight a sight did show:
The prison sky seemed calm to me
As orange tints embraced her blue;
Then Jesus spoke through every cloud
With love no mortal mouth can do.

*****

I owe Yeats a great debt of thanks as his poem- this particular poem- has contributed a great deal to the poetic style of writing I’ve adopted . I thought it therefore utterly appropriate to post it here today- a sort of commemoration and extension of gratitude to Yeats and his work.

*****

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.



*The journal entry was actually on 11/23/08 and read:

Read The Song of Wandering Aengus by Yeats; recorded the format of this poem and scripted a stanza after its manner.

Ηχω (Echo)

"That tongue of yours, by which I have been tricked, shall have its power curtailed and enjoy the briefest use of speech." (Hera to Echo. Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.365).

Ηχω

What beckons back is not the word
Of her whose voice I deem sublime:
I call, but repetitions heard
Reveal not Echo’s voice, but mine.



Of the Poem (Background):

Zeus was hardly the god of fidelity, an unfortunate fact his wife Hera became increasingly aware of (especially when it came to his attraction to mountain nymphs). Desiring to catch him in the act of infidelity, Hera attempts to secretly follow Zeus, but Echo (another nymph) would distract her with her attractive voice and attractive stories. When Hera realized this she punished the nymph by stripping away her ability to speak freely. The curse only enabled Echo to repeat the last words spoken by another- hence the name.

The quatrain above indirectly embraces an aspect of the story that is seldom thought about: Echo’s isolation. In it is a voice that calls out to Echo and waits in anticipation for a response. What rings back is an exact- albeit fainter- replication of the voice’s voice. It is Echo, but the conclusion is drawn that she is nowhere to be found, and that the returning voice is a mere repetition of the original call.

The unspoken tragedy of the poem is that it is Echo’s voice beckoning back, returning the call in replications she’s unable to break- replications so convincing, so exact, that the voice concludes the non-existence of a respondent. Her voice- once loved, even cherished by the nymph herself- is now the selfsame voice that produces a deception in its hearers, that keeps Echo forever in isolation. It’s the deception placed on the calling voice- repetitions heard / reveal not Echo’s voice, but mine- that magnify the punishment originally bestow by Hera (creating, as it were, a secondary punishment of eternal isolation).

*****

I have so many isolated stanzas (as I call them) that I have a folder specifically dedicated to them. Ηχω, a simple quatrain, is grouped with these. The stanzas range from heroic couplets to tercets to octets. Each of them have been kept because I felt them to be complete, fully finished poems- this despite the fact that they’re simple stand alone stanzas.

This begs a question: How long must a poem be to be considered a poem? Is there a such thing as ‘too short’ a poem? I’m utterly comfortable calling an isolated couplet a complete poem (especially if it was intended as such). Ezra Pound certainly considered his In a Station of the Metro not only a complete poem, but a highly mature one. A haiku is an exceedingly short poem, and yet contains volumes of poetic imagery (some of the best in the world).

It seems impossible that a single word could constitute a poem; but how about two carefully placed words? John 11:35, the shortest verse in the Bible, has a very poetic feel to it ... yet it's only two words.

As for me, I know internally when I can dub a work of mine as a poem (short or not)- but would that hold true by definition? I guess what my curiosity wants to know is this: What’s the shortest poem ever written; and, how short is too short (if there is such a thing)? Feel free to give an opinion on the matter (short or not).

copyright © 2009

Blame Her Not

She was mortal and was loved, but fell victim to a darkness she had never known. Seduced away from her first love and enraptured by the force of the vampire’s gaze, she was bitten, and dying, came into the life of the immortal undead- and she knew it.

Her first love, from whom she fled, loved her nonetheless; and although he knew of her murderous and irrevocable desire for human blood, and although he knew the hideous secret of her new nature, his blame fell upon the thief who stole his mortal love away.



Blame Her Not

Can I cast blame for what she eats,
Or that she strolls where sunlight sleeps;
Or blame her that her skin is pale,
Whose lips are glist’ning red as ale?
Am I to cast accusing stares
And judge her not of wheat, but tares;
Or shun her for her blood-lust bent,
The girl whose ghostly heart is rent?

I saw her wand’ring in the chill
Amidst the fog and murky rill;
And starving- writhing there in pain-
She slipp’d into the town again.
Who knows where all that hunger led,
But townsfolk found another dead:
A victim’s corpse lay by the mill-
And yet I cannot blame her still.

-jwm

Narcissus*

Narcissus

He viewed afoot a silv’ry lake
And took himself to take a drink-
Then beauty moved his thirsting soul,
As there he bent above the brink.

No mortal flesh this seemed to he
Who marveled at its dear design-
Behold, a face beheld him back,
Whose symmetry was pure divine!

Handsome was the heav’nly sight
That rip’ling lay within the clear;
He touched his finger to its cheek
And wavelets had it disappear.

When agitation placid came
He dared- from love- new love embrace;
But wading through the wat’ry void
Disturbed the beauty of its face.

Again it came, again he touch’d;
Again the figure fluctuates.
Lamenting there aside that bank
He cursed himself and all the Fates:

“What awful light is cast below
That tells me what I see is I:
The boy within the shimm’ring gleam,
‘Tis me, O wretch’d me- but why?”

Then Nemesis who linger’d there,
With fatal judgment in her vest,
Remorseless cast the final lot
Which grew despairing in his breast.

Bereft of love’s requited touch
He pounded moans upon his chest,
And stagg’ring ‘mongst the wind’d reeds
There came by Nyx eternal rest.

His deathbed there’s a thing of woe,
A cautionary tale some fear:
The Naiads, Dryads- all the Nymphs,
Warn self-love grows a flower there.

-jwm


*See comments area for brief background to the poem.

Eve's Reflection (Milton Fragment)

It was the heat of the day that drew Narcissus to a pool of water. As he bent over its silvery gleam for a drink an image appeared before him- it was his self. Narcissus, who hadn’t seen himself before, was so enamored by what he saw he instantly feel in love- wishing, as it were, to become one with the object of his delight, kissing the reflection and trying to pull it out of the water. After having realized that what he had viewed was merely a reflection of himself, he became utterly distraught and grief-stricken as the object of his highest desire became suddenly unattainable ...

Ah wretched me! I now begin too late
To find out all the long-perplex'd deceit;
It is my self I love, my self I see.

His unrequited love killed him beside that body of water.



Milton, whose brilliant mind was highly versed in Greek mythology, drew upon the story of Narcissus as he introduces us to Eve. In Book IV of Paradise Lost (449 – 471), Eve recalls her first memories as a human. In her recollection she gives the following account of the very first human face she sees:


That day I oft remember, when from sleep
I first awaked, and found myself reposed
Under a shade on flowers, much wondering where
And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.
Not distant far from thence a murmuring sound
Of waters issued from a cave, and spread
Into a liquid plain, then stood unmoved
Pure as the expanse of Heaven; I thither went
With unexperienced thought, and laid me down
On the green bank, to look into the clear
Smooth lake, that to me seemed another sky.
As I bent down to look, just opposite
A shape within the watery gleam appeared,
Bending to look on me: I started back,
It started back; but pleased I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love: There I had fixed
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warned me; 'What thou seest,
'What there thou seest, fair Creature, is thyself;
'With thee it came and goes: but follow me,
'And I will bring thee where no shadow stays
'Thy coming…


Of the Poem:

Clearly this is a parallel to Narcissus, and there’s no doubt that Milton intends a warning here: That self-love is inherently idolatrous, leads to creature worship (which is essentially theft from God), and is in the end ultimately self-destructive.

It was by unchecked self-complacency that Narcissus destroys himself. His self-love rose to such a height as to count itself the highest image of contemplation, a clear case of idolatry. But Eve is spared. It’s a voice, God’s to be sure, that both warns and redeems Eve from such a narcissistic fate. "Follow me" it implores.

It's interseting that God’s manifestation to Eve was not that of a corporeal, tangible one; but was rather by an unseen Voice. Milton seems to imply that we ought not be drawn away by things seen, but lead by God who is Spirit. There immediately comes to mind several verses from scripture: John 4:24, II Cor 5:7, Heb 11:3, II Cor 4:18 to name a few.

I find it amazing that the above passage, selected from a larger work, is a poem on its own. Milton has this way of poeticizing that- whether it be line or stanza, chapter or epic- that renders every minute detail scripted by him poetic. His prolific poetic mind is massive. He is to poetry what Socrates is to philosophy. Of Milton, what poet compares?

The Second Coming: Yeats Poem

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?



Of the Poem:

Yeats was heavily influenced by a mysticism whose theological content derived from a hodgepodge of deep Eastern ideas. Although Yeats was certainly not a Christian, he would throughout his life employ Christian language and themes to convey this or that particular idea. In his apocalyptic poem, The Second Coming, such use is made evident.

Yeats began to work on this poem in January of 1919, during a time when the political atmosphere was highly turbulent: the first World War just ended; the Russian Revolution- to which Yeats was heatedly opposed- had begun (not to mention the festering internal divisions of Ireland’s religious and political communities).

Like the philosopher Hegel (too a mystic minded man), Yeats believed there’s a dialectical process underlying historical events, and further believed that humans have the ability to glimpse it as they all have access to a ‘common consciousness’ not unlike the ‘world soul’ of the Transcendentalists. Note how Yeats derives his poetic vision from it when he says in line 12: a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight (where the Spiritus Mundi is the common medium).

The ‘gyre’ of line 1 is probably the most important individual word in the whole poem. This is a Yeatsian term that contains abstract geometrical figures whose superimposed movements work as a scale to determine a particular historical state or time (it’s essentially his crystal ball to historical events). For more on the gyre see comments area.

The repetitious use of words in the poem seem meant to produce within the reader a sort of nervous perception of impending danger or dark times (words like ‘turning’ in line one, ‘loosed’ in 4 and 5, and, along with the title of the poem, lines 10 and 11’s ‘Second Coming’).

Lines 7 and 8 are essentially a paraphrase of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. The ‘stony sleep’ of line 19 is borrowed from William Blake’s somewhat Gnostic myth, The Book of Urizen:

But Urizen laid in a stony sleep
Unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity.
Chapter III. Verse 10

The ‘rocking cradle’ of line 20 coupled with the reference to ‘Bethlehem’ in line 22 is clearly an allusion to the nativity of Christ, which would seem to suggest that the ‘rough beat’ slouching toward that holy city is an entity holding a particular hostility with regards to Jesus and Christianity. My personal take is that the reference is toward an antichrist figure very much similar to the one mentioned in John’s first letter (this despite the many interpretations which seem to rule that conclusion out).

The poem seems to depict a period in history (Yeats’ history to be clear) where a gloomy paradigm shift is at hand; where authority in the highest spiritual sense of the word is on the verge of abrogation (and this by the manifestation of that personae whom Yeats equates with that stony figure: the Sphinx).

If ever there were a poem one could deem as dark and riddled with dreadful prophetic imagery, would it not be this one? Top ten for creepiness for sure. What does it for me is that this poem was not for Yeats a hypothetical narrative or story… no, I am utterly convinced that he expected fulfillment of it.

There’s so much that can be elaborated on here with regard to this poem (and perhaps in time I’ll come back to it). I decided to post it- along with a brief biography from Poets.org- because Yeats was one of the first poets I actively began to read, and this particular poem was one of the first that … well, I’ll say it … really creeped me out.

Perseus (by Robert Hayden)

I had to post this poem by Robert Hayden- absolutely incredible, the imagery accomplished in a mere 14 lines! If anyone reads this, you've got to let me know what you think.


Perseus

Her sleeping head with its great gelid mass
of serpents torpidly astir
burned into the mirroring shield--
a scathing image dire
as hated truth the mind accepts at last
and festers on.
I struck. The shield flashed bare.

Yet even as I lifted up the head
and started from that place
of gazing silences and terrored stone,
I thirsted to destroy.
None could have passed me then--
no garland-bearing girl, no priest
or staring boy--and lived.



The first time I read this poem I was completely pulled outside of myself by awe. What Robert Hayden accomplishes within a mere 14 (incomplete) lines of poetry is something that is seldom seen. It astonishes the imagination that a whole story, a whole world and realm can be conveyed by so simple a thing as a poem.

In fact, what completely did it for me, the thing that pushed over in me that which was merely in tilt, was John Milton's description of the Garden of Eden. There were no extravagant words employed, and as far as I can remember, Milton almost never even mentioned the Garden. But within 8 lines, and by means of images taken from mythology, Milton expresses what in other words would simply require pages to attain.

Here are those 8 lines below (again, what do you think):


Not that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove
Of Daphne by Orontes, and the inspired
Castalian spring, might with this Paradise
Of Eden strive...

Paradise Lost, Book IV 268 - 275

City Naiad

No, she's not me (whose heart is vain)
She's happy where no glades are seen
Whose glades are city-lights and rain
And puddles in the streets unclean

The vagabonds there seem her kin
Who sleep on papers by the mall
In alleys soaked in piss and gin
That shifty crowds don't see at all

She glides ethereal like God
On sullen ground where many’ve died
And seeks about the slum-filled quad
The sacred pools where many've cried

And here within my cozy life
Where heat and food and rest are clean
I think their life just rosy strife
And God forbid the rain as mean

But not so with her honest eyes
That sees by truth those somber sights
Whose tears reflect the raining skies
And all those amber city-lights

-jwm

Lethe (A Broken Sonnet)

HE EDGED carefully by foot Lethe’s deep
Where those who drank were oblivion fraught;
Unaware of the wake and far from sleep,
There inly arose this, his tempted thought:

What blissful state attends her solemn brook
Where with one single sip woes wash away-
And pain too, hidden pain, flushed from its nook-
If only by tasting I taste this day?
What harm could hither come to me by dream,
Or ill fate posit this slumbering night?

So he palmed lethal liquid from her stream
When just before the fatal sip, a sight!
There, etched into a whitened cypress tree,
Pale words: Before you drink, remember me.

-jwm


Of the Poem (A Note on Lethe):

Lethe (lee-thee) is the name of one of the Greek mythological rivers of the underworld. It is said that, after having passed on to that world, her waters were offered to those who wished to rid themselves of the memories of their former lives.

The obliteration of the memory of all past ills seems to have been the tempting factor of her waters; unfortunately, this obliteration included all good and joyful memories as well. Some seemed to have overlooked this crucial element.