—Photos Courtesy of Public Domain
DÊÍPHOBOS
(Iliad, Book 22)
[Hektor’s ghost:]
Brother Illusion, you stand alongside me
Outside the Skaean Gates, our Troy-town walls
With a plumb-line straight ashen spear to hand me,
For I have just cast my own stout spear
At glint-armored Akhilleus; it flew
Straight at the below-throat softness
His chest’s topmost bone-cup underscores—then veered:
Gusted aside, one puff, by a god or goddess? Then clattered,
Faithless lance, to the hard dirt lightly stone-studded.
I knew I could count on you, Dêíphobos,
To stanch the Fate-flow liquefying my knee-sinews,
To stanch my coward-run around our walls,
Shame even now ringing our city
Like a blood moat. Akhilleus treads hard on
My spear, forbids its retrieval. He flings
At me his Pelian ash-spear; the point gouges
The soft part of my throat with enraged metal.
I gather in one agonized flash my last
Dismay at your desertion, your vanishing,
Brother Illusion. Gather, this many-stranded
Moment, one question: had you, O Dêíphobos,
Alone stood facing the blood-handed Slaughterer,
Would I have stalked from the disgorging gates
To pass you my best bronze-tipped spear
In sibling love and trust? Or shrugged
Craven instinct around me and vanished in flesh,
As you now have misted away through the sky-portals?
IMPROMPTU KEATS
But we must not forget that the strange interest which
the man inspires has caused all his failures to be brought
into notice; a cruelty which no other poet has suffered
to a like extent.
—Amy Lowell
It might be a completely different writer
From him who wrote “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”
Who penned the uneven “Sleep and Poetry.”
In clichés or listless rhymes, the schoolboy fighter?
Hard to locate: once in a while, a line
Deserving to slip into Endymion.
Even at that stage, odd how Keats can print
His longest narrative, sacrificial pawn
Pressed forward, meant to “die away.” A hint
How different his thought-pattern from that of Pope?
Even without foreknowledge of his death,
Why hold back verses for seven years in hope
They’ll outlast life? He issues them hot with breath
—To keep their heat or cool? Process of mind
Matures like produce; consumed, leaves husks behind:
As Jacqueline Rose defined
(Like Keats’ discards along his flint-strewn path?)
Our need to know embryo poems by Sylvia Plath.
KEATS’S “ON FIRST LOOKING”
I.
Cortez? Balboa? Who cares that Keats got wrong
Who first found the Pacific? He mistook
No other detail that counts against the strong
Fine sonnet of his first volume. Keats could look
With absorbed prolonged fixation at the brink
On seawater rippling or motionless. “Eagle eyes”
Matters: the raptor’s gaze would never blink
Though aimed straight at the sun—not cicatrize
Blinded as would a human’s. Notice the glare
Where daylight pounds coastal ocean? This youth sees
What Balboa can’t while bent above the slab
Of his discovery. Keats is caught mid-stare,
Steeped in it, not praying, not spouting banalities.
Cortez becomes Keats by knowing when not to blab.
II.
Too soon, Keats with that preternatural sense
Of Fate all around him, will subject that gaze
Of “eagle eyes” to unfocused drift. How tense
We turn, to find his “sick eagle” in a daze,
Helpless to tell apart sun from sky. Yet still,
The Muse is with him. This famed “Chapman” sonnet
Finds Keats reciting a vaunt or brag that will
Come stamped with the Odyssean seal upon it.
Spinning his yarn of ever-discovering travel,
Is Keats not Athena’s favorite, though he’s worn
And scarred by warfare and loss of ships? The gravel
Of vocal fry should leave a throat half-torn.
But the goddess rinsed him of salt, turned blond and bright
His gray hair. Voice rings young, still keen to fight.
WILSON AND LOCKHART AND CROKER
(on Keats’ Endymion)
There’s no such thing as bad publicity,
We chant at bad reviews. But haven’t reckoned
With Britain’s critics of the nineteenth century:
Leisured, half-learned Scottish twits once beckoned
Snootily from the Quarterly and Blackwood’s,
Chief prey—but not the lone man rendered victim—
John Keats. Much gleeful derision at the backwoods
Poet they termed an “apothecary.” Dictum
Or screed half-cocked for faults found that were his
Or weren’t. Their snark was sheer sardonic class,
Part tossing of darts to bullseye Leigh Hunt’s phiz:
Whatever their gripe, their scribblings taste of brass,
All crassest assassination. With their scatter-gun
Blasts, could they turn Keats a second Chatterton?
JOHN KEATS
What did his life give Keats?
More than it took away?
He gave us his heartbeats
In thoughts the world repeats
But could not in his day.
What did his life give Keats?
Gifts fit for one who meets
Those folk who read for play?
He gave us his heartbeats
On birth-of-word-steeped sheets
We search when in dismay.
What did his life give Keats?
The tart repulse that greets
Verse with new things to say.
He gave us his heartbeats;
He died in fevered heats
No doctor could delay.
What did his life give Keats
Who gave us his heartbeats?
______________________
Today’s LittleBitLongerNip:
MOTHER GOOSE TELLS HER TALE
—Tom Goff
—O Mother Goose, pray, Mother Goose,
Where have you been?
—To stony-gated London Town,
To see, and not be seen.
—O Mother Goose, pray, Mother Goose,
How found you London Town?
—I ’scaped a hen, who watched my pen,
Flew light as the goose-down.
—O Mother Goose, pray, Mother Goose,
What saw you there and then?
—I peered and peeked, with up-tilt beak,
At ladies famed and men.
—O Mother Goose, pray, Mother Goose,
How tell you what you saw?
—Like silly goose, with large and loose
Embroidery of jaw.
—O Mother Goose, pray, Mother Goose,
How give you no offense?
—I gabble wild, like five-years’ child,
Plumed plump with innocence.
_____________________
Classy SnakePal Tom Goff writes to us of Keats today, in sonnets and couplets and otherwise, and our thanks to him for his words and his rhythms and his references—definitely points and poems to ponder!
For more about the history of pens, go to www.thejournalshop.com/thejournal/history-of-pens AND/OR theoldtimey.com/quill-pen/.
_____________________
—Medusa
Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.
Would you like to be a SnakePal?
All you have to do is send poetry and/or
photos and artwork to
kathykieth@hotmail.com. We post
work from all over the world, including
that which was previously published.
Just remember:
the snakes of Medusa are always hungry—
for poetry, of course!
