Lyric Greece: a Sonnet Sequence Part Three

I Have Looked upon the Face of Jolliness

The ancient Greeks in poetry were lewd

As limericks, playful, silly as a stand

Up joker on a comic’s platform, rude

And crude, yep, far more rude than Russell Brand.

Emitted from these ancient rhythmic throats

Were poems dealing with the gods, the coarse

Ones, Pan and Dionysus, and hot goats

And Satyrs, all with sex drives like a horse

In festivals of reeling lust and wine.

Iambic or dactylic, lines with jolts,

Trochaic poems aimed at the divine

Ones’ spillings, jouncing hard and up like colts.

..Disrupted rhythms, meters, urgent verse

….Were aimed at wildest holiness—or worse.

 

If Orpheus Had Not Looked Back

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If Orpheus had not looked round, his wife

Would not have fallen back to death.  He would

Have had her all his unheroic life.

The Argosy was past.  He understood

That.  It was likely he would not have gone

Out on another quest with Jason or

His like.  Eurydice would see him yawn

With tedium.  She would have heard him snore

Instead of singing love and death with lyre

And holy words.  She would have made him stew

And porridge by their Thracian hearthside fire.

She would have seen their lust go up the flue.

His voice would have lost its edge, his song

Its passion.  Boredom would have come along.

     Imperfection as Perfection

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The eyes are white and wide.  They look as spare

As Orpheus’s when he lost his wife.

Yet Alexander never knew such bare

And sand-dune meaninglessness in his life.

Perhaps the perfect oval of his face

Veiled slightly by the waves of hair does most

Too cry out flawlessness, a broken case

Completeness.  Chin and lower lip are full

To balance out the breadth of features, not

That any element is carved too broad

Or thick.  His heaviness is beauty fraught

With calmest force.  He aggregates a god.

The broken nose is settled with a brow

Which pulls the eye to swelling like a vow.

Instinct and Alexander the Hateful

Achilles, after many years of war,

And after losing Patroklus to death,

Reacted vilely, more like smelly whore

Than man of Greek-sky principles.  Blue death

And anguish overwhelming him like sea

Wave, catastrophic, made by monsters, sent

Submerging him in salt-depth grief so he

Was twisted out of decency and bent

To evil.  Alexander had men pierce

The feet of Batis.  This was not pure wrath.

This homage to Achilles was too fierce.

Then Batis was dragged in his horses’ path.

..Achilles followed instinct, anger nude,

….But Alexander was just cruelly crude.

    Invisible Ivory Music

 

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. ~ John Keats

Herus Pamphilius claimed that Orpheus’s drifting soul, destined to be incarnated anew in some other physical form after he had died, elected to be born a swan so that he would not come out of a woman, loathing all women due to their deadly effect on him. ~ Plato, The Republic, Book 10

When Orpheus discovered that his soul

Must travel, travel, travel to a new

Birth, he preferred to migrate in that bowl

That is a cob’s deep nature.  Swirling blue

Of river waters would be well to float

Him through to immortality.  If hatched

Of whitest white, his arcing, curving throat

Could sing his longing unheard songs unmatched

In silent beauty.  Most of all he wished

To be unborn of woman, thinking breath

That they might give him would be always fished

Up from the dregs of mud-like jealous death.

..He did not want to be a woman’s gift

….Again.  He wanted maleness left adrift.

Orpheus and Male Reincarnation

When Orpheus decided that he craved

Escape from women utterly and so

Desired migration of his spirit saved

From birth to any of them and to go

Instead into the beauty of a cob,

The poet did not try to fly away

To some escape from further deaths.  To rob

Death of its wrongful right or to dismay

Long universal laws was not the singer’s aim.

We wanted rid of women, that is all.

Repeated deaths are fated.  But the shame

He hated was the thought his soul would crawl

Inside a woman’s womb.  He feared such sacks

Because of clawed soft hands and their attacks.

Ithaca ( Ἰθάκη), the Dull Town

Your wife is there, your two-balled heir, and hound

Still true (like bone to brawn) behind his eyes

Destroyed with cataracts—but his snout’s bound

To ravel your armpit; he’s the surprise

That isn’t surprising when you return

Among the power suitors, culling coins

That smell like faithlessness.  And now you burn

In Ithaca for things you’ve known, myrrhed loins

Of Circe, scent of hot stake driven through

The Cyclop’s eyeball, stench of steaming blood

Outside the walls of Troy, and wine-dark blue

Of seas you’ll never breathe again, all these cud

You’ll have to chew on now that you are in

This royal village.  Boredom is its sin.

          John Keats

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‘the last lineal descendent of Apollo’ ~ Arthur Hallam

The inmost soul of poetry is Keats.

Its spirit is derived from locks of hair

And curls about his temples.  Muse’s seats

……….

In heaven rock with wonder and despair

When goddesses consider how our loss

Of genius in his chanting throat and lips

Quakes far beyond our measure.  Words emboss

The universe because perfection slips

Out in the ether in between the stars

And giant planets from his pen and eyes

Now dead.  The lines are metal-clad like Mars

Or golden like Greek prehistoric skies.

..Apollo rises up to take their fire

….And touch it to his son as with a lyre.

Like a Voice from the Cave of Delphi

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“S[ocrates; known as Suqrat in Muslim literature] professes to be dismayed to find that the poets whom he questioned were quite incapable of explaining the meaning of their poetry, and concludes that they compose not  wisdom  …  but by a kind of instinct and inspiration … like seers.”

~ Penelope Murray, Plato on Poetry, 10

…..

When Suqrat bothered to get serious

About the poets, he began to ask

Them to explain their lines.  Imperious

As always Plato took them all to task

Because they could not tell him clearly all

Their poems’ meant.  He wanted them to be

Logicians, more like him.  His high-class drawl

Undoubtedly removed their clarity.

He felt their ambiguity of thought

Was pitiful.  Instead of thinking, “Wait.

Perhaps that is the point,” the thinker ought

To have decided not to castigate

Them for their fuzzy inability,

Much better than his own sterility.

Literary Inspiration from on High

“The gods arranged all this, and sent them their misfortunes in order that future generations might have something to sing about.” ~ King Alcinous in the Odyssey at the end of Book VIII

The question of our poets’ impulse, long

Ago explained by Alcinous, clears

Up all the theory.  Great bardic song

And lines came springing up from shield shaped tears

And wounds.  Philosophers, esthetic thought,

And modern literary academe,

Spare our minds then, which have been too fraught

With suppositions, fancy and extreme.

Accept the simple truth.  The reason that

Great poetry exists is due to gods

Who tortured primal men and made them splat

Against the worst of evils and bad odds.

..If gods had not thus intervened, our hearts

….Would now make do with small pathetic arts.

Lopped and Crippled

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So little full-limbed poetry survives

The ancient Greeks, we’re left to deal with things

Grammarians have saved for us—and lives

Of poets put on plinths though lacking wings.

Biographies are mutely hard to piece

Together, and of course we don’t know if

The details, not destroyed by time, release

Carved truths in dithyrambic lines.   A whiff

Of verisimilude wafts past, but

Everything’s less certain than we want.

We want those golden images that jut

Up like flames of truth, not ones that taunt

Us with their spikes of hints and pale-eyed winks.

We want whole works, not a moth-eaten sphinx.

 

The Primitive Polyphemus

before the Strangers’ Attack

But then again we do not always need

The total poem.  Au contraire. We guess

The substance missing.  Hurt lines also bleed.

The rips and blots allow us to say yes

To meanings we imagine.  Deletions

Free up the mind to search for what lines might

Have sung.  Cannon balls fired by Venetians

Destroyed the Parthenon, but now the sight

Of it, its ragged grace, permits the brain

The chance for visions of its marble strength

Unscarred.  We close our eyelids.  Then we strain

To see its first conception, that full length

Unbroken in its beauty. Hearts can spy

Out perfect splendor, primal to their eye.

Love as Sung by Alexis

“He is not foolish, nor yet is he wise;

But he is made up of all kinds of quality,

And underneath one form bears many natures.”

From the Phaedrus of Alexis,

                           In Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae

Alexis steps away most carefully

From saying that the god called love is male

Alone.  No.  He or she is prayerfully

Invoked as every sex combined.  The gale

That rushes in our ribcage when love grabs

Our hearts is not a maleness that impales.

It is not femininity that takes

Us deeply in.  The open throat assails

Us with its need for poetry and song

And other fevered, flesh-like needy things,

Destroys logic, and imposes long

Fulfillments in us, flying without wings

The way we fly in nightmare scenes above

The ground of life, mouths opened wide for love.

      Love that is Love

“Then his folly is

Pure madness, but his wisdom a philosopher’s”

From the Phaedrus of Alexis,

                           In Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae

A giant book about gastronomy

And wisdom—if such stuff can be combined—

Pretends to touch on the astronomy

Of everything.  It tells of men who dined

On wisdom and on alcohol and food.

The dining host and guests fuse male desires.

Along the way they manage to allude

To thinkers calmly dealing with those criers

Respected most, philosophers and those

Who sing of passion.  All acknowledge bad

And good finds dovetailed union.  They propose

That love is wise and foolish.  Love is mad.

..That comes from recipes included in

….Men’s minds with purities of wildest sin.

Masculine Rhythms and Forms

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How formal were the Greeks in ancient verse,

The oldest voices most of all, the blind

One, Homer, and then Hesiod.  Disperse

All thoughts of paltry freedom.  Do not mind

The strictest beauties of control.  Since males

Are almost always in the focus of

This poetry, we must expect the tales

Inside the lines to waive romantic love

And weaker sentiments.  A formal tower

Implies a manly consciousness.  The flesh

Of poems like the Iliad has power

Because poetics and the subject mesh.

..Do not desire a flabbiness of free

….Verse there.  Expect a stricter liberty.

  Metallic Heroes Did not Dare

          to Turn their Backs

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Bronze swords, and shields, and helmets with their crests

They wore while slicing men with wounds and death.

The warriors wore bronze breastplates on their chests

To save their lungs from being pierced so breath

Would wheeze with bubbled blood from them.  Greek bones

And shins wore greaves in bronze to save the fronts

Of legs from havoc.  Soldiers loved the groans

Of enemies and sounds of death’s last grunts

In victims.  Those were something Greeks could gloat

About once spoils had been taken.  In

Their courts much later troubadours could bloat

Greek victories, forging glory out of sin.

The mutilated dead lay on dark fields

Without their looted bronze and gory shields.

Misogyny (μισογυνία) is a Greek Word

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“What would a man not give to engage in conversation with Orpheus?” ~ Plato

That marble minded Plato thinks of men,

Not women, girls, or boys before they grow

Their body hair in armpit, crotch, and then

The beard.  His brain was right since women glow

With threat and pain for Orpheus.  They tear

Him into pieces, cannibals of verse,

And song, and sex with beautiful young flare

Of manly parts.  His wife was even worse.

Eurydice abandoned him across the Styx

Where lyrics, potency of maleness, harp

And grief are pale.  She was his crucifix.

He knew a wife’s and women’s loves are sharp.

..So Plato knew the universe’s laws.

….The singer should seek males, not women’ claws.

Mixed Race Divinity and Humanity

Socrates “builds up a picture of the poet as ‘a light, winged, holy creature’, who cannot compose until he is out of his mind and possessed . . . .  The god takes away the poet’s senses, and uses him . . . so that the poems he utters are ‘not human and of men, but divine and of the gods’ ”. ~ Penelope Murray, Plato on Poetry, 8-9

Hyperbole is Plato’s swollen trick

While he pretends that poetry is good.

The ploy almost winning, glistening, slick,

Is glossy till the truth is understood.

He makes the overwhelming of the soul

Of poets by divinity to seem

A glorious invasion.  Gods control

The poets’ minds.  Divinity, extreme

In ravishment, imposes holy rape

Resulting in an offspring at best mixed

In its identity, a monstrous shape,

Both god and human.  Both of them are nixed,

Though.  Such miscegenation makes burlesque,

Degrading both, the two strengths turned grotesque.

        Murmurs/Purling

 

[“Lo!  I divine through murmurs borne
The subtle thread of voices old”
~ Paul Verlaine, “Je divine, a travers un murmure”
                         in Romances sans Paroles]

Just broken murmurs come to us from those
First poets Greece produced, more broken than
The amputated, slammed and shattered pose
Of centaur, or a goddess, or a man—
A hoplyte—marble muscles shouting out
Their former beauty like a deaf and dumb
House slave who, captured in a battle rout,
Once dressed in silks, a princess, is a crumb
Of crust beside a royal couch.  The lines,
The piecemeal lines grammarians have saved
Of Sappho, are as sharp as knives and tines
Crushed under centuries of rubble.  Staved
In, crumpled, nevertheless sharpness glints
From fragments, from supernal parchment hints.

[The prefacial quotation (from a very old-fashioned translation) is from Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles which he wrote while living with Rimbaud in London.]

Music, Poetry and Architecture, All from Mathematics

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The poet Amphion rebuilt the streets

And temples, houses, and the stoa of

The ruined Cadmeia.  His lyric beats

Were more for honing stonework than for love.

His lyre (a gift from Muses or the god

Apollo) Amphion employed for arts

Including architecture.  That facade

Of Zeus’s temple and its pillared parts

Arose because of Amphion’s sung verse,

And all the other walls reared up because

Of poetry and melody — diverse

The powers of a perfect poet’s laws.

..His serenading and his lines caused strength

….Of architecture, stretched in columned length.

            Myths of Poetry

The early words of poetry arose

From darkness in the depths of throat and lungs

In caves and mixed with burning air.  The bows

And arrows in the shadows gave the tongues

That sang the blood and flesh which chanting needs.

Or else out on a plain where wary beasts

Might cringe away from stanzas, words like beads

Made jewels in the night beside the feasts

On kills.  Or else a priestess riddled out

A destiny that chilled the flesh and veins

About a man killed by his son, about

That son who makes the marriage stains

In bed with that man’s wife, or more the spell

A poet prays to fetch his love from hell.

       Nietzsche vs. Plato

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Nietzsche said that Plato was “the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced.”

This Plato spoke in imagery so far

Removed from Heidegger that Plato seems

An artist and a poet.  How bizarre

This glows is true to us as cordial beams

Of perfect light admitted to a cave,

Like pretty Mozart music played in crass

Despair might resonate in shadows, stave

Off blackness, and relieve from Philip Glass.

Just being here is not enough for some,

Like Plato.  Poets capturing the truth

Of all that is most lovely overcome

Our senses like a perfect body’s youth.

..That imagery is what Platonic thought

….Most hates.  It loathes mere being.  It loves Ought.

No Room for Unholiness not Cleansed

“ ‘What would a man not give,’declares Plato in the Apology,

‘to engage in conversation with Orpheus and Musaeus and

Hesiod and Homer?’  Can we do something of the sort?  If not

to engage in conversation, then at least to glimpse them as they

go about their holy and unholy business?’ ”

~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 21

We watch them singing in the darkness, hear

The notes and words, in darkness and in light,

And sometimes in the smell of lamps, strings clear,

Plucked, sunlight as the background sometimes, spite

Of love and war and murder by the fire,

The phrases of the ancients find their place

In us who need them, those who seek desire

Of holiness.  The poets interlace

The tongue and string vibrations.  Open voice

And strangest intervals of lyres wipe out

Unholiness since even sins rejoice

In music that is truth.  We feel devout.

..We do not want these poets to be seen

….In gutters.  We want poems fiery clean.

Not for Conquering to Crush and Make a Cruel Empire but for Unforgotten Beauty

“Hystaspes had a younger brother whose name was Zariadres:  and they were both men of great personal beauty” ~ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, XIII, 919

So what if you exist in words alone

In some freak journal from the ancient past,

A pampered book that almost makes us groan

With pedantry gone mad, deep in the vast

Egyptian desert?  What if that is all

Remaining of a man two thousand years

Now lost except for those few lines, a crawl

Of syllables across a scroll?  Your fears—

Oblivion, blank annihilation,

An emptiness so full that you might not

Have ever been, an evaporation

So total that you might have been just naught—

Are dead, for still you are what most can’t be,

Embalmed with lovely masculinity.

  Only the Poet Triumphed

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The only man to live the storm through on

The wind-wrecked ship was singing all the while.

The singer, he survived it in the dawn.

Alone he lived.  Alone he missed the isle

Of death.  The helmsman and the sailors died.

The night and winds and sea consumed those, all,

So only he remained.  With words his guide,

His words with music, he strong-armed the sprawl

And found himself upon a rocky ledge.

He  spread his chiton and his cloak then in

The early morning sun, there on the edge

Of life and death.  The singer raised his chin

To sing again, a psalm of praise as plain

As whitest cloth.  It helped to calm his pain.

                      Open

The ancient Greeks believed that light beams flowed

Both into eyes and out of them.  If stars

Poured in their lights, then stars in light streams flowed

Back out.  If Venus, Jupiter, or Mars

Fell down through irises, then planets’ lights

Shone outward, too.  When constellations poured

Their glories down, then galaxies sent flights

Of splendor from men’s eyes.  Perfections soared

From eyes and lifted hearts like greedy Zeus

Gripped Ganymede to haul him to a cloud

Of lust.  What suns put in, the eyes could loose

From pupils, shafts of light with love endowed.

..When Sappho begged a gorgeous man, “Look straight,”

….She wanted shafts to make her core dilate.

      Pindar on Theoxenus

 

The poet Pindar focuses on love

Derived from burning rays from flashing eyes

Of young Theoxenus.  They are above

All others.  Love in any other guise

Is dimness at its best.  The sun can melt

The wax of bees, can sting it with its heat.

When passion of another kind is felt

Like lust for bolder women then, though sweet,

It’s paltry when compared to the desire

This boy’s looks alone can generate.

The lines suggest that men not set on fire

By him love only money or love hate.

Some man might harbor a very hard heart

But most would grow . . . another hardened part.

“One must pluck loves, my heart, in due season and at the proper age.

Ah! But any man who catches with his glance

The bright rays flashing from Theoxenus’s eyes

And is not tossed on the waves of desire,

Has a black heart of adamant or iron [End Page 255]

Forged in a cold flame, and dishonored by Aphrodite of the arching brow

Either toils compulsively for money

Or, as a slave, is towed down a path utterly cold

By a woman’s boldness.But I, by the will of the Love Goddess, melt

Like the wax of holy bees stung by the sun’s heat,

Whenever I look upon the fresh-limbed youth of boys.

And surely even on the isle of Tenedos

Seduction and Grace dwell

In the son of Hagesilas

Pindar fr. 123 S.-M.”

Oracular, or Delphi at its Worst*

In Homer’s time no word existed for

Art.  Praxitiles and Sappho had no term

For it. The Greeks had not even the spore

Of such a word, so Plato spoke no firm

Ideals about that thing which we call art.

He had too much, perhaps, to say about

The worth of poetry.  It hit the heart

Too truly for his liking, made him pout

That it was not as clear as thinking in

Philosophy, and made him fearful of

Its purpose and effects—far too like skin.

Some lines might sing like snake tongues touching love.

..Verse might be beautiful as wine dark eyes

….Or toxic in appeal to those not wise.

* “The Greeks had no word to denote those activities that we now subsume under the term ‘art’.” ~ Penelope Murray, Plato on Poetry, p. 1

Orpheus Died Several Times

and Could not Save Himself

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Intent is feeble like a hyacinth

In rocks along a mountain path where feet

Can crush.  Intent is not a marble plinth

Upholding steadfast Zeus.  Intention, neat

As it might be, is not the same as gain.

Philosophy is purer than the blooms

But does not guarantee that present pain

Will be replaced with calm.  Unnoticed dooms

Are hovering.  The myths we tell our hearts

Are only tales.  They seem to offer truths

And even some salvation.  All their arts

And beauties we pass on to girls and youths,

But myths are only literature.  They save

Themselves, retold, but we go to the grave.

Orpheus like One Crucified

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His music tamed a god and tamed the world

Except for human hatreds.  Fiercest birds

              Orpheus by Astrid Zydower

Rose up to beauty’s calmer heights.  Love swirled

Around the poet’s music and his words

And animals around his shouldered arms

To find there curled up peace.  The King of Hell

Was moved to tears and tried to halt the harms

Of death to bride and groom.  To feel the swell

Of Orpheus in song was like the beat

Of pulses from on high, from moon and star,

From heroes and the goddesses, a suite

Of constellations sending from afar.

..The Greeks knew passions fiercer than a man,

….A spite that stretched a wide and unplumbed span.

Orpheus, Once Torn Limb from Sturdy Limb

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……….

                                                              Orphée by Raoul Dufy

Long after he was born, and lived, and died,

The first of poets lives and lives.  Before

The rape of art by Modernism tried

To kill off commonsense, an artist bore

Down on a piece of wood to make this strong

Depiction of the poet’s presence still

In culture, much around us.  During long

Millennia he holds a lyre.  Until

Our kind are dead, more dead than he has been

For many centuries, Orpheus will shine.

In this depiction even each bold shin

And calf shows he himself is still the shrine

For verse and emblematic for all art.

In death he is the living set apart.

          Orpheus Sings

“he sings to distract his shipmates from the irresistible lure of the Sirens onto the rocks”

~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 32

The Sirens were a favorite myth, a bit

Like Amazons, their queen and all of that.

Bronze ancient men feared females who had grit

That killed inside their voices with a splat

Of beauty that was fatal.  Hatred, fear,

And pregnant loathing are why men cut off

Those warrior breasts in stories.  That veneer

Of male respect is something which we scoff

At now.  We have our modern shrinks, Germaine,

And other super feminists to tell

With sneers how men have always felt a pain

When women such as Circe cast their spell.

..Men’s threatened machoness needs him to sing.

….It wants Hippolyta raped by a king.

The next two sonnets may offend some readers.  If you think you may be offended, please do not read them.

      Painless Pleasure: Two contradictory versions of the myth of Ganymede

“to be very eager in the pursuit of pleasure is to go hunting for pain….  Homer…says that the greatest gods receive no advantage from their power, but are even much injured by it, if they will allow themselves to be hurried away by the pursuit of pleasure.” ~ Athenaeus of Naucratis, Deipnosophistae, BOOK X11, 819

When Zeus had girls to love, he had his love

With them and that was it.  He left them raped

And he was satisfied. Somewhere above

Him, up on Olympus, nothing escaped

The vitriolic green, that green, green eye

Of Hera and she tried as hard as she

Could strain to cause him misery.  Defy

He did.  So much for Zeus’s misery.

But when he wooed a perfect, perfect boy,

The wifey didn’t really seem care.

She let him have unhindered his hot toy.

She didn’t really seem to mind this pair.

Please notice, Athenaeus. . .  Never mind girls.

The moral:  fall in love with boy curls.

 

When Zeus had girls to love, he had his love

With them and that was it.  He left them raped

And he was satisfied. Somewhere above

Him, up on Olympus, nothing escaped

The vitriolic green, that green, green eye

Of Hera and she tried as hard as she

Could strain to cause him misery.  Defy

He did.  So much for Zeus’s misery.

But when he wooed a perfect, perfect boy,

The wifey in her rage went hotly spare.

She hated Ganymede her husband’s toy,

Destroyed Idean parts in her despair.

Please notice, Athenaeus. . .  Never mind girls.

The moral:  fall in love with boy curls.

Philopoiêtai, Poetry Lovers from Time Immemorial

“Plato’s Symposium shows how Plato deploys dramatic irony to undermine the philopoiêtai’s use of poetry. Elizabeth Belfiore (“Poets and the Symposium”) argues that the dialogue’s first five symposiasts, in their poetic citations, reveal their failure to think about anything other than the charm of their context-shorn quotations.” ~ http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/plato-and-the-poets/

Just what is wrong with charm? And why not love

The poetry that charms with sweetness, light,

And fragrance like gardenias?  Must verse shove

A darkness and a weight on readers, blight

Their joys, or make them think so deeply that

They find themselves in midnight and distress?

We have the horror genres with their splat

Of gore and blood, and Hollywood’s black mess

Of crime and lust and death.  Why shouldn’t we

Have fun just reading beauty that beguiles

Us for a moment?  Why shouldn’t we be

Free to wink through happiness and smiles?

..Philosophers may favor sackcloth verse,

….But nothing’s wrong with charm.  There is far worse.

                 Piéria

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“the Muses’ ancient home between the roots of Olympus and the sea;

to where

‘Pēneus rolls his fountains

Against the morning star’.” ~ F. L. Lucas, Greek Poetry, xxvii

From very roots our poetry and arts

Grow up and outward, widely, like an oak

Or like computer matrices with hearts.

No gods or geeks are needed to provoke

Our poems, paintings, novels, music’s phrase,

Our rangpur poems, bitter, tart and sweet,

…….https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Citrus_x_limonia_(2).jpg

Symphonic paintings swirled with piquant glaze,

Or novel’s sweep refusing to retreat

From truth, or music like a dragon’s fire

That flames from reptile lips and scaly fangs.

We do not need the muses to inspire.

We aim for coronary heaving pangs.

..Who needs the nymphs of rivers or a star

….When artists aim for tidal wave and scar?

Pigs Would Fly if Their Sties Were Noble

Poor Socrates.  He thought that if the young

Were wrapped in images of beauty, they

Would take good in and then could climb each rung

Of rightness.  Lovelinesses would convey

Them up and straight to healthiness of soul.

Their hearts would be hygienic as the folk

Who live in wholesome climes and who can stroll

Through lovely breezes that he thought evoke

A sturdy righteousness.  So, poets who

Are wise will stick to showing only good

And beauty.  These are guidelines that he drew.

This is what that simpleton understood.

He did not seem to know that kids want sly

Pigheadednesss, not beauty that floats high.

Plato and Powerful Enigmas

When best, it hums ambiguous like tunes

From dead angels, or more like rubbed out lines

On palimpsests, or like the muffled runes

From mouths of ancient Druid priests, like signs

On pharaonic walls and tombs before

The hieroglyphs were fathomed in their dark

Existence.  We are walked through rooms in poor

Light.  Sentimentality mixed with stark

Dismissal, dovetailed with a piety

Of dubious extremes and the ideal

Swirled all together.  No sobriety

Is needed.  Readers only want to feel.

..It hums like colors in an LSD

….Confusion.  That is perfect poetry.

The next sonnet may offend some readers.  If you think you may be offended, please do not read it.

Plato Hated Poetry, Poor Thing

First Sappho catalogued the symptoms of

Tsunami wave emotions.  Sickness like

This malady has been treated as love

By writers ever since.  It is a spike

Right through the thorax, never mind a prong

From Cupid, and a conflagration through

Our arteries and guts.  It isn’t wrong

To  say that Plato was a failure who

Tried stupidly to dress it up as souls

Transported to the realms of spirit highs

Above mere lust, above the fevered poles

Desiring gals, and guys’ cocks gouging guys.

Which one was truer, Plato’s more abstract

Ideal, or Sappho on the fuckin’ act?

Poetry and Hateful Plato

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Alone among male populations of

The ancient world (and modern) Plato held

The poet Orpheus in hatred.  Love

Of poets and of music had not swelled

In Plato, ever.  Orpheus was charged

With cowardice and being just a harp

Player.  The accusations were enlarged

Then.  Plato said the poet was a sharp

Contriver wanting only to venture

Into Hades for the thrill.  “Harper,” just,

No more, the gods despised him.  The clencher?

He failed.  She fell back into less than dust.

The poet got what he deserved, attacked

And killed by merest women.  He got whacked.

……….

http://the-toast.net/2015/01/26/gleeful-mobs-women-murdering-men-western-art-history/

Poetry, Crime, and Government

“Poets are the legislators of the world.” ~ Shelley

The ancient Greeks still live.  They are not dead.

Their poetry from then speaks still upon

Some pages on our shelves.  The scholar’s head

Refuses to let go that singing dawn.

These poets are the Russian vory of

The world of literature.  They infiltrate

And take control of those in charge above.

These stooges do not realize the weight

Of ancient minds that drives them even now

Or else there is a symbiosis made

Of power when crime and politics each vow

In thinking handed down.  Poets pervade

Our western leaders.  At some far remove

The ancient words are used to force and prove.

Poetry Makes a Different Exploration of the Realm of Death

No poet thinks about the path the wife

Of Orpheus took down to Hades.  Not

One poet ever writes about how harshly rife

That journey was.  The poisoned bride’s death lot

Was just the same as anyone’s.  The path

The poet took to fetch her, though, was filled

With horrors overcome.  He stilled the wrath

Of Cerberus with singing.  Three heads thrilled

And tilted to it and he almost whined

With pity.  Spinning stopped and fiery pain

For Ixion paused.  Furies’ cheeks were brined:

Eumenides felt sentimental stain.

..The doom of one adored was then paroled.

….The lava heart of Pluto turned to gold.

      Poets as Healers

The first great poet, Orpheus, was called

The Healer.  Is there some great truth involved

In that?  Surely Plato wasn’t enthralled

With poets.  Plato sneered.  He was resolved

To say that they were more inclined to ill

And that they couldn’t even explain their

Craft (seeming to require them to fulfil

The roles of wise academics aware

Of all the dithyrambs and rests) as if

The poets thought mechanically.

Instead their medicine produced a whiff

Of deity and myrrh volcanically.

..The sage one wanted Orpheus to chant

….With wisdom like professors in their cant.

Poets, Poetry, and Women

For well thou know’st to my dear doting heart
Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel.
Yet, in good faith, some say that thee behold,
Thy face hath not the power to make love groan ~ Sonnet 131

Who thinks of blank Eurydice? None.  Slack

Her hair may well have been.  It seems we do

Not know her coloration.  This great lack

Is emblematic.  If her eyes were blue,

Or black, or green, or brown, no one has thought

About them. If her hair was curled, or straight,

Or wavy, we know nothing of it.  Naught

Is known except she was the wife, the bait

To lure the poet into hell.  He went

To find her to recover her and so

We guess that she was lovely.  Love is meant

To leap from beauty.  This might make him go

To Hades, but then men are known to fall

For even ugly women, graceful as a scrawl.

Ruined Myth and Heavy Reality

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The pillars look more like some backbones stripped

Of skin and muscle than Apollo’s space

In Delphi and are squat and stodgy, chipped

And scarred by ruthless time.  They have less grace

Than ragged mountains in the background.  They

At least look normal in their slopes and curves

Though battered also.  Ruined slabs convey

To tourists almost nothing.   Missing nerves

Of ancient prophecy are not supplied

To people wearing sunscreen, Nike shoes,

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/297/tourists

And Raybans.  No one steps up as a guide

For life to offer prayers and dreams to choose.

The stones are worse than ghosts since stones are real.

Bashed columns cannot tell us what to feel.

Sappho Wrote about Twelve Thousand Lines of Poetry

Twelve thousands lines of poetry were torched

By time and Christians.  Piety increased

The ravages, all this because she scorched

With love for girls.  Bishops made a feast

Of male disgust that Sappho caused by fire

In veins for younger women.  Holy men

Destroyed her verses making them a pyre

Of beauty and destruction, one.  Her pen

Outdid there sanctimony.  No one knows

Who all the Christians were.  They disappeared

In something less than dust.  Their sacred prose

Has been erased, clean as a shaved off beard.

..The few, those flaming stanzas that survive,

….Have kept her and her singing love alive.

  Scholarly Blindness

“Since before 450 BC there was no prose literature,

our only windows on the ancient world are the poems.”

~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 8

It only goes to show that scholars love

To focus narrowly.  He looked so hard

At Greeks that he is far too far above

The evidence.  In Homer’s own backyard

The Hebrews started writing prose so long

Before the Grecian poems, now we must

Surmise how distant all that was.  The song

Of Greece was shiny new when desert dust

Had settled on the scroll of Job.  The books

We call the Pentateuch are full of prose

And stories not in verse.  So if he looks

Across the sea, he’ll know where stories rose

Outside of poetry, at least the ones

Near Attica.   He’s missed out Jacob’s sons.

                      Scorn

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“Enargeîs is the technical term ‘for divine epiphany:

a word that contains the dazzle of “white,” argós, which

comes to designate a pure, unquestionable “conspicuous-ness” ’ ”.

~  Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 19

I wonder if perhaps we moderns know

This brilliant whiteness much more clearly than

The ancients did.  They made their temples glow

With painted color like the rainbow span

…..

But more intense.  The goddess and the god

Were daubed with firmest tints of red and gold,

Blues, reds, greens—strong as emeralds.  How odd

That seems to us when what we know is bold

Severest white divinities and stone

Carved columns.  Noontime light in Greece

Reveals the purest color for a throne,

A god’s own seat that might hold Jason’s fleece.

..Before the gods became poetic wares,

….Divinities appeared as white-hot glares.

  Personalized Epiphany

“This ‘conspicuousness’, he adds ‘will later be inhabited

by poetry, thus becoming perhaps the characteristic that

distinguishes poetry from every other form.’”

~  Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 19

Deep poetry does something depths can not

Do.  It stands out among the arts, a thing

Conspicuous in power.  Music, hot

With inspiration, has a different wing

Which rises in the air and heart, but lines

Of Mariana trench profoundness work

Inside the heart, inside its fathom brines

And currents.  Down in that divinest murk

Are frigid swelters only words can tell.

The plastic arts appeal to eye alone,

Or sometimes hand, but do not cast the spell

Veins need.  Paints do not travel in the bone.

..The theatre and film demand too much

….Control.  A poem grants the reader’s touch.

Where?   Where?  Where?

“Achieved poetry paints with at least one colour

which can be found nowhere else.”

~  Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 19

Do you know just what that color is?  Gods’

Eyes must contain it—goddesses’ more so—

Yet can we see it there?  Perhaps it nods

At us with holy winks above the slow

Convictions of a palm tree’s fronds before

The sacrifice by priests in island shades.

Perhaps it gives us glimpses from the floor

Of marble temples.  Mostly it evades

Us.  That is why it matters.  Those who grasp

The color, artisans with words, do not

Themselves  know what it is.  Fists barely clasp

It in their lines.  The hue hates being caught.

..Once found it fades.  It must be caught again.

….The rainbow trout gasps out in air-filled pain.

Treatments in English Lessons

Yet even poetry is now without

Transcendence.  No one wants to read it. No

One pays for it and no one is devout

About it as they were before the glow

Of cinema and television screens.

Forget about the God is dead debate.

Forget about the notion that machines

Could write it and computers might dictate

It.  It is now long dead for most except

For weddings, funerals, engagement showers

And such.  No man or woman now is swept

Away to love by sonnets.  They have lost their powers.

..The poem’s stored in classrooms only.  Still

….It’s there—given like a cultural pill.

 

Stunned, Stung with Aesthetic Tears

“When it reaches Alexandria, poetry comes in out of the sun,

retires to the library . . .  And so it [poetry] survives in a world

where the vulgar tongue is not Greek.”

~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 19

At Florida Technological U

One afternoon I had some time to kill,

Or I was bored with working my way through

Some Library Science.  Needing health’s pill

I headed for the shelves of poems doomed

To be unopened in the stacks and took

Anthologized poems down.  Wonder loomed.

I read an ode by Keats.  The cosmos shook.

My eyes sang out with tears and not because

Of sentiment inside those lines.  The tears

Burned down my cheeks because of beauty’s laws.

The ode was like the music of the spheres.

..Perfection in the crafting of each line,

….And not words’ meanings, formed that white stone shrine.

Sing in Me, Rational Muse!

Plato’s “descriptions of poetic inspiration occur over a

long period of time, ranging from his earliest works to

his latest, and there is considerable uniformity in what

he says.  Throughout P.’s work the mental state of the

inspired poet is described in similar terms:  the poet,

when composing, is in a frenzy and out of his mind; he

creates by divine dispensation, but not with knowledge.”

~ Penelope Murray, Plato on Poetry, 7

Let’s dispense with all this inspiration

Guff.  Firstly, no one thinks like that now. More

Than Plato, we employ cogitation

And do not need divine afflatus.  Soar

With visions from on high?  I don’t think so.

Instead a line or image comes to mind,

Or one idea.  That’s enough. Words flow.

And ,secondly, while reading you may find

Your “Muse” in something there—an expression

Or thought that causes something to explode

Inside your brain—like an intercession

From gods, but this in a rational mode.

..You don’t need “Inspiration” to extol

….It, Keats.  Just grab the hint—then let it roll.

Some Myths are Far More Real

“Orpheus is a hero, not a god, and a hero more valuable than

most gods, just as Prometheus was.”

~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 21

The gods are less than Orpheus of Thrace.

Gods loomed up large but they were never real.

Majestic for a while, they left no trace,

No godly trace, once Christ’s and Allah’s peal

Rang out.  And what was left?  Some poems, plays

And myths, poetic in their power these tales

But only words.  The new Gods live in blaze

Of certainty and they are males,

Males only, not confused with female stuff.

They crushed the competition on the shores

Of Middle Sea.  The new gods brightly snuff

Out lightning bolts, making goddesses whores.

..Yet Orpheus’s shattering still lives

….Across the world.  Orpheus still gives.

               Sovereignty

Modern poetry  modern verse  contemporary poetry  contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

“Is it simply that people who philosophize think that people who produce, consume, or appreciate poetry (the philopoiêtai) have the wrong priorities, and the proponents of poetry think the same of the philosophers?” ~ http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/plato-and-the-poets/

We hold up ancient Greece as sovereign thought’s

Stone citadel, a marble temple made

Of sun struck pillars bright with megawatts

Of power and think that Greek heads banished shade

(Like poetry, emotion, shame) from pure

Philosophy.  The mind of Plato shunned

The poets, exiled them, proposed to cure

His Parthenon with cleanliness.  He stunned

His listeners by ostracizing plays,

Sharp strophes, epics and silk lyrics from

His architraved Republic.  They caused maze

And disarray.  They created a slum.

Pretending men could cast out feelings forms

A fool of Plato and his front-brained norms.

 

 

Spells and the Thoughts of Tiresias

“Halliwell’s basic argument is that Socrates admits the Book X arguments to be insecure and open to defeat. He calls them ‘spells’ rather than philosophical knowledge, and he asserts that he must use them [those arguments] constantly, rather than deploying them once and for all. Socrates is committed to philosophical ideals, but does not have the full immunity granted by the ‘transcendent knowledge of the good.’ Socrates seeks not to become deaf to poetry but ‘to find an ethical justification for continuing to have [the] experience [of poetic enchantment].’ In this way Plato shows that the model life, Socrates’, seeks to welcome both philosophy and poetry, all the while recognizing the intense difficulty in doing so.” ~ http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/plato-and-the-poets/

When inspiration comes, it is God’s spell.

It casts a spell divinity implants

Inside a soul.  When it begins to swell,

A voice in poem and in music pants

Its way to life through throat, and mouth, and lips.

It is the sort of miracle that shakes

Philosophers and moves unwilling hips

To rhythms, rhymes and rhythms like black snakes

In mating, writhing, hissing in their lust,

Their lust transcendent in their need to know

The meaning of the gods who made them, thrust,

And freed them on the stones and made them glow

With mystery of desire that justifies

Existence of an art for gasping thighs.

 

  Socrates versus Sappho

 

One wonders if poor Socrates might just

Have been much happier if he had made

Up poems, not philosophy.  A gust

Of inspiration from Apollo swayed

The poets into rhapsody of thrill.

While lost in love for some young person’s hair,

The writers in their songs spewed joy.  The spill

Of this in Sappho then became a snare,

When Phaon or a woman far beyond

Mere beauty left her unfulfilled, gave verse

That rings immortal to this day.  The fond

Loves last forever though they were a curse

Like Alcibiades.  The thinker’s heights

Should turn to Aphrodite’s lyric nights.

To see Sappho’s fragmentary poem go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho_31

 

Stabbing in the Cave-like Dark before There Were Laboratories or Electron Microscopes, Plato Presumed that There Are Souls and that They Grow. How Very Poetic.

“Halliwell claims that Socrates’ remarks about poetry early and late in the Republic differ because the earlier remarks, told during the construction of the ideal state, are oriented toward poetry in education and soul formation, while the latter, told after the state has been constructed, are oriented toward the committed ‘philosophical’ poetry-lover.” ~ http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/plato-and-the-poets/

Who knew that souls are formed as time goes on?

Can that be proved?  Can the existence of

The soul be proved?  Philosophers can’t con

Us with their thinking if it is above

Plain proof.  Where is the evidence of souls

Beneath a microscope’s deep lens?  What tool

Can measure souls?  Can labs impose controls

To test, and test, and test again?  What fool

Besides a Socrates or Plato would

Assume the soul’s existence if there’s no

Hard evidence, empirical, they could

Adduce?  And how can any of us know

Their claims are true and check if souls can morph

At all?  Such thought’s malformed, too like a dwarf.

     Stretching the Eternal

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“the soul’s survival and residual divinity” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 23

The followers of Orpheus, if not

The man himself, desired a lengthening

Of all they thought was mortal, what they thought

Could be like deities, the strengthening

Of what is god-like in humanity.

His music in itself might be the strong

Force for controlling the insanity

Of crazed rites in wine-drunk groves.  When the song

Had lyrics added, it might free up souls

Entrapped in lusting only—and make clear

The spirits’ needs.  Apollo’s cool controls,

All gold, inspire chorales from longing’s sphere.

Because of him the whitest silent swans

Might learn to sing in everlasting dawns.

That Supreme Nazi, Plato,  Sounded Off about Orpheus

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He takes the poison of his courage and

His love.  He does not try to dazzle death

With poetry:   Romeo is not bland

Like that.  He gulps down.  He breathes his last breath

For love made up of colors of the fire

Flame swallowers devour.  He just kills

Himself.  Yet Orpheus did not desire

That heroism.  He offered Pluto thrills

To charm Eurydice past Hades’ clasp

But did not offer up his harping life.

The poet did not leap into the grasp

Of hell to save his ravishment stained wife.

..The god of Hades loved his wife too much

….To give the coward back his wife to touch.

   The Big Exceptions

The women move in caged in places both

In life and plays.  In poetry they are

Curtailed to Sappho and Corinna.  Troth

Constricts Penelope.  It hems.  No spar

To take her seas away, she sits at loom,

Is trapped at night unpicking her trapped work,

And knows a palace room is just a room.

When husband is away she cannot shirk,

Not even then.  Medea knows this worst

Of all, this girdle of confinement.  She

Is left behind with children, then the burst

With hatred’s poison.  Only then she’s free.

..The goddesses and sorceresses, they

….Unjustly have their paltry fun with prey.

The Cavern Leading to the Muses

When Linus first invented rhythm with

A melody in song, the beauty came

Ideal — so lovely that a sacred myth

Could not compete.  Apollo could not tame

A thing so perfect, so he had to kill

The poet.  Deity must never lose

With humans, so the great one felt a shrill

Hostility.  A god will not excuse

Impertinence in men.  Don’t touch the Ark.

Don’t make a chord-like breakthrough in the arts.

Do not obtrude upon Olympus.  Dark

That comes from harsh divinity’s bright hearts

Shall crash against you.  No one can help save

You.  You will be an image in a cave.

           The Creed

 

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“One mustn’t accuse Virgil or Ovid of originality, of

wilfully making fictions of such importance.  By the

time of the Roman poets, everything was done upon

established authority, and what was original was the

way the derived pieces were assembled.”

~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 25

Eternal truths cannot be honed and changed.

The thinkers and the poets can at best

Make beauties of a truth rise rearranged

In thought and taste.  The royal bursar’s chest

Holds everything perfection has to give,

Yet when the coffer opens we must find

Its contents, not attempt to add or sieve.

They wait to guide us, lead, not to bind,

No more than compasses or charts would force

A seaman to sublimest shores.  The choice

Is his.  Like Eden’s fourfold rivers’ source,

https://davebold370.deviantart.com/art/Completed-Philosopher-s-stone-564603578

Truths flow for drinking, if we would rejoice.

..Philosophers and poets find that truth

….Is ever changeless in immortal youth.

The Desert and Dementia

“that fragmented legacy of ideas and figures, stories and histories which can be as real to us as our own more immediate past” ~ Michael Schmidt, The  First Poets

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri were trapped

In desert sands for half a million nights

And days.  A Middle Eastern dump had wrapped

Them in its rubbish.  Lost Menander’s heights

Of comedy lay there in remnants.  Some

Of  Sappho’s fragments were recovered.  More

Of Euclid’s perfect diagrams rose from

The trash heap.  Histories long silent roar.

The poetry of Alcman hymns again

A resurrected song beside a life

Of Athens’ youngest playwright of the reign

Of tragedies composed of mythic strife.

..These little tattered pieces from the blind

….Sands are like soft shards in a faded mind.

The Eternal Cry of Women about Men and Love

“Your thoughtlessness in love,

Orpheus, has wrecked us both.”  ~ Virgil, in Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, p. 93

They never know, these men, including when

They get the clearest orders.  Even gods

Are useless:  Pluto gives instructions.  Then

The poet fails to follow them.  The odds

Of lovers (male ones) hearing what they need

To know about perpetuating love

Are small, much smaller than a mustard seed.

They look to something elsewhere far above

Or just beyond what gods and women say,

Their fishing trip or motorcycles, hard

Things masculinity would like to play

With, or like being the world’s best bard.

..And then the women keep their feelings to

….Themselves, all subtle.  Men don’t have a clue.

The Ion, the Phaedrus, the Republic

When someone else is all mixed up, we tend

To sneer at what they have to say, so why

Not Plato?  Must we allow him to bend

And contradict his arguments?  Is high

Philosophy supposed to work like that?

He has the voices in two dialogues

Praise poets.  In Republic he goes Splat!

On them, as if they were the low cur dogs

Of Athens, not the pedigreed fine men

For his ideal society.  Now if

One Xanthippe spoke such a mess, why then

We’d all despise her.  But with so much whiff

Of contradiction coming out of Him,

We’re all supposed to sing a great love hymn.

    Robotic Super Zero

That killing machine, Achilles, hero

Extraordinaire, was worshiped by the men

Of old who didn’t work out that zero

Was Zeus’s son’s level of courage.  When

A boy is made invulnerable by

Divinities (except for that one heel),

Then maybe Greeks should have queried just why

He had no fear while making victims squeal

In agony from sword and axe and club.

He never had to know what bravery

Feels like.  This guy could indifferently drub

A dozen daily.  It was knavery

Pretending he was made of hero stuff.

This was just a bunch of poetic guff.

The Luna Moth, the Poet, and Philosopher

Modern poetry  modern verse  contemporary poetry  contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

“Carlotta Capuccino [in her article], ‘Plato’s Ion and the Ethics of Praise,’ takes the . . . view that poetry deploys ‘groundless praise’ and ‘promotes a dogmatic and passive style of life and thought,’ and so is ‘essentially incompatible with philosophy.’”

~ http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/plato-and-the-poets/

The pupa waits.  Dogmatically it will

Become a Luna moth.  It waits in sleep

Or something like a sleep.  It waits, is still,

Or nearly still, its waiting patience deep.

Sometimes it makes a sound. Sometimes it moves

But mostly it is passive in its wait.

Full incarnation comes when it approves;

Emerges into beauty; finds the state

It meditated on in its cocoon.

It never had to think.  The Luna spreads

Its perfect wings and if a coded rune

Is on each wing, a colored mystery sheds

No logic, meaning, or direction for

Our minds.  We do not need to ask for more.

 

 

   The Luxury of Peace

Modern poetry  modern verse  contemporary poetry  contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

Modern poetry  modern verse  contemporary poetry  contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

Long centuries before the growth of hate

With Rome’s warmongering, the Greeks emerged

With games of dithyrambs and sport, a spate

Of comedy and tragedy that purged.

The irony is tyrants helped to cause

This strange fresh crop.  The fortunes that they blew

Required remodeled dreaming and new laws.

When naked athlete, tensed and straining, threw

His javelin, he became a star

More wonderful than murderers called kings

And generals, if, that is, he threw it far

https://www.art-bronze-sculptures.com/408/futurism-bronze-figure-warrior-with-spear-signed-u.-boccioni

Enough.  It seemed humanity grew wings.

..The soaring poet and musician took

….The prize, not soldiers.  Our old world shook.

The Night before Thermopylae—

“The Hot Gates”

“Phaedrus’s praise for erôs (love) as a precondition for courage employs poetic quotations from poems that in fact state that wisdom is the true precondition, and that erotic passion without thoughtfulness leads to disaster.” ~ http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/plato-and-the-poets/

The backbone of a man needs love.  Without

That it becomes a wounded reed, a limb

That hangs loose from the trunk, however stout

The oak might be.  Devotion gives to him

A living sturdiness that is not blown

About by breezes or by tempests sent

By chance.  A warrior does not need a throne

For courage.  Soldiers lie inside their tent

Together in the dawn before the fight

That threatens lovers’ Spartan blood with death.

They breathe together in the calm of night

And when the war comes, shout with single breath.

..If both must die in glory, still they know

..Their love will fire the centuries with its glow.

               The Poet!

“light, winged, holy creature”

~ The words of Socrates to describe a poet, as quoted in

Penelope Murray, Plato on Poetry, 8

That’s always how I’ve thought about myself,

Yup, yes, of course, at least when I have thought

Of me as “poet”—surely more than just an elf

With little, cutesy wings. In fact, a lot

More serious is what I am, more like

A diademed  archangel.  Yes!  I know

The truth about me as a poet.  Hike

Me up to higher realms and make me glow

If you’re describing me, the rhymester.  Don’t

Just think of me as someone who churns out

Those screeds of sonnets, though that is my wont,

But praise me as angel or I’ll pout.

..I’m nearly holy, Phillip poet me.

….Bow down before in my high degree.

   The Poetic Kind of True

Modern poetry  modern verse  contemporary poetry  contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

“The stories begin in kinds of truth.  As events recede in time,

they grow not smaller but larger in language.  The ancestor who

fought locally becomes a hero in a battle which assumes

the scale of the epic.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 9

Modern poetry  modern verse  contemporary poetry  contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

The poet makes life truer, makes it large

As it is meant to be.  The poet makes

Our history higher.  This provides the charge

That it deserves.  The Everest language shakes

The past as if volcanic, lava’s spew

Writ hotter in an earthquake realm of love

Or war.  The poet’s panoramic view

Is like the three dimensional above

The landscape of the long ago.  The lens

Is clearer, or at least it seems to be.

Its focus peels away the small to cleanse

Or shows the small with male intensity.

The epic eyes of poetry are blue,

As vast as Greek skies, truer than the true.

      The Sacred Fire

Modern poetry  modern verse  contemporary poetry  contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

The Thespians of Greece in ancient times

Upheld the god of love, devout as saints

Have ever been.  Deep lovers’ paradigms

Are never quite as true as perfect paints:

Vermeer’s silk velvet spaces spring to mind.

The purity those Thespians conceived

For love is cleaner than the poet, blind

And holy in lost time, is now perceived,

Though he is idolized in throbbing lines

And storied power.  Those worshippers above

All else endorsed the ideal truth.  Her shrines

Aroused the thuribles of incensed love.

All other gods and goddesses must bow

To love’s high crown on love’s broad brow.

   The Silliness of Men

“He ran naked to the supposed site of Achilles’ tomb at Troy, while his male lover, Hephaestion, crowned the tomb of Achilles’ beloved Patroclus.”

~ Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World:  an Epic History from Homer to Hadrian

Forget about the evils men have done.

They’re far too awful and depressing, yes?

Instead let’s have a little bit more fun

By thinking of the sappiness and mess

That is the mind of masculinity.

The son of Philip ran around a tomb

Supposedly in the vicinity

Of  Homer’s hero.  No one with a womb

Would do a thing as daft as that.  The man

He loved from adolescence, his boyfriend

Until death ended all that, also ran

To crown Patroclus’s grave.  That toy friend,

This Hephaestion, he was just as mad.

But then it’s better to be mad than bad.

           The Tortoise

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“Other poems by Apollinaire relate to Orpheus, for example, ‘The Tortoise,’ whose shell—a gift from Apollo—provided the frame of his lyre.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The  First  Poets, 23

The tortoise might be thought of as a thing

For poetry by Hughes, his awful “Pike”

And so on.  Tortoises don’t make us sing

That often.  Ancient ugliness, they’re like

Revolting dinosauric beasts of old

With metal skin, almost, and blankest face.

They drag and scrabble on the land.  They’re mould

From pre-historic times.  They have a trace

Of hope built in since they’ve survived so long,

But that is it.  And yet Apollo gave

A tortoise shell to Orpheus.  The song

Of poetry, the sweetest and the grave,

Has made the tortoise holy in its grim

Repulsiveness.  It gave the first great hymn.

     The Triune Potency

According to Penelope Murray, “Socrates . . . . says, ‘any story or poem . . . narrates things past, present or future’ ”.  ~ Plato on Poetry, 4

We want a poem that is full of now,

And past, and future, full.  We want intense

Severity of teeth.  We want to bow

Gazelle-like to the leopard’s front fangs, dense

With meaning and with ambiguity.

The present all alone is not enough.

We want an urge to promiscuity

With what is past and future, rape as rough

As words can manage.  Settling for the past

When we could have tomorrow and today

Involved in the assault would not be vast

Enough to meet our needs.  The lines must slay.

We want it all in perfect poetry,

Our history, present, and eternity.

A New Heaven and Undirtied Earth

For James Reis

Forget the “thought” of Plato (Socrates)

That stories, plays, and poetry can cope

With only pasts, and now, and futures.  Seize

The truth instead.  Create a newer scope

By setting works in time that’s never been,

That isn’t present, and will never be.

Create your verse in periods that are clean,

Not sullied by such days.  Beside a sea

Imagined by a mind that does not need

Mere yesterdays, tomorrows, or such facts,

This literature can plant its untried seed

To make a universe with dreamed up acts,

Acts made in unknown moments, in a place

Not found yet, springing in a poet’s space.

The Truth about Ancient History, Plato, and Poetry

“Socrates says in the Republic that he and Plato’s brothers might have to inform poetry about the ancient quarrel between it and philosophy. Glenn Most (“What Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry?”) argues that Plato most likely invented this quarrel. Anyway, we do not see any evidence of it before him. Xenophanes, a philosopher famous for critiquing Homeric and Hesiodic theology, himself wrote poetry, and seems to have been contesting the truth of the epic world-views, not its mode of presentation. Heraclitus criticized everybody who deemed himself wise, Pythagoras and Hecataeus as much as Hesiod and Archilochus. Archaic poetry appears not to mark out philosophers for criticism. (In fact, ‘philosophy’ words are not extant in poetry until Aristophanes’ Ecclesiasuzae of 391, and even there not derisively). Comedians writing during Plato’s life depicted characters ridiculing intellectuals, but this hardly counts as an ‘ancient quarrel,’ and certainly not one between ‘poetry’ and ‘philosophy’.”  See http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/plato-and-the-poets/

The ancient war around the strictest thought

(Philosophy and logic) and between

The poets was created by the “ought”

In Plato’s brain.  His rules, a bit too keen

As Nazi thinking often is, occurred

To him and him alone.  He pretended

This war stretched backward.  In this way he slurred

The poets.  Plato’s war has not ended.

It still goes forward in some thoughtless minds

Like his.  His backward thinking was intense.

Creating facts which were not facts with blinds

He put up, Plato wasn’t worth two cents

About pure poetry.  His mental act

Ignored the truth of history and fact.

              The Truth

The ancient Greeks are there. They do not hide

The truth about themselves like holy priests

Of papal Rome.  The Greeks adored male pride

And loathed it.  They were not pure logic’s beasts:

They gloried in their contradictions, found

Them not the least distressing.  If a man

Became a traitor or could drag around

Another warrior there behind hate’s van,

The ancients loved him for his evil—or

His greatness just so long as it was grown

In masculinity.  The man could whore

Around.  What mattered was testosterone.

..A man could be straightforward or be sly.

….His triumph was the point, through truth or lie.

The Venerable, Ancient Need

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“And Socrates the philosopher, who despised everything, was, for all that,

subdued by the beauty of Alcibiades; as also was the venerable Aristotle

by the beauty of his pupil Phaselites [Palaephatus of Abydus].” ~ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, XIII, 906

The never changing needs are with us.  They

Brood, like the beauty of a petrified

Tree’s wood.  Both are colorful and hard.  They stay

Destruction’s hand.  Unending need is wide

Like our imagination of the seas

Of myth, Aegean, Adriatic skies,

And Attic sweetness like the Sirens’ pleas

That would have drowned a hero more unwise.

Some needs cannot be banished.  They are strong

Against the will of iron minded men

And longer than millennia are long.

Needs lurk within the heart’s most sacred den.

Philosophers pretend.  The saints deny.

Some needs are beautiful.  They do not die.

                                The Voice

1 Kings 19:11-12 And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD. And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

² And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.

³ And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.

⁴ And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.

⁵ And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.

⁶ Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.  ~Exodus 3: 2-6

We all are fearing that that voice will speak,
But how will it be spoken? Will we hear
It when it whispers in an ancient Greek
Severity of stone hard Doric fear?
Perhaps a still, small hoarseness in a fire
Will echo in the deserts of our soul
When grief has overtaken us entire.
Perhaps a lotus blossom is the scroll
Containing silence greater than the Word,
A nothingness assuring us of peace
No syllables could give. A dream of blurred
Divinity might stutter and then cease.
..A wheezing seer gurgles in a drawl,
….“Perhaps there is no speaker after all.”

They Loved Sovereignty and Liberty Most

“And the Lacedæmonians offer sacrifices to Love before they go to battle, thinking that safety and victory depend on the friendship and those who stand side by side in the battle array.  And the Cretans, in their line of battle, adorn the handsomest of their citizens, and employ them to offer sacrifices to Love on behalf of the state, as Sosicrates relates.  And the regiment among the Thebans which is called the Sacred Band, is wholly composed of mutual lovers, indicating the majesty of the God, these men prefer a glorious death to a shameful and discreditable life.  But the Samians (as Erxias says, in his History of Colophon), having consecrated a gymnasium to Love, called the festival which was instituted in his honour the Eleutheria, or Feast of Liberty; and it was owing to this God, too, that they Athenians obtained their freedom.” ~ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae

Greeks knew that rapt successes are the best,

Whether they are triumphs of the mind or

The triumphs of the body.  In the quest

For total victory Greeks knew that war

Was utmost.  The Olympics worshipped this

The clearest doctrine of their ways.  To wear

The laurel crown there on that field was bliss.

To win a prize was greater than a prayer,

No matter if the laurels were for ode

Or tragedy.  The losers slunk away

But champions invoked the highest code,

Respect, loud as Bucephalus’s bray.

..Most royal of the gods is Nike.  Keen

….Victory is king and freedom his queen.

Three Thousand Years before Apple and Three Thousand Years after the iPad

I carry in my knapsack poems by

The ancient Greeks, the eldest ones, the best,

The best of elders.  They are still as spry

As dolphins’ arcs by the Argosy’s quest.

Lines wait within the safety of the book,

Alive and lively now as ever, like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_plant

A resurrection plant.  They undertook

Divinity when quilling down each spike

Of brilliance in their lines.  But crammed in with

That poetry I carry modern things,

Phone chargers and an iPad.  There’s no myth

To go with them.  They don’t  have singing wings.

..Nope,  iPads, gone  millennia from now,

….Will be nothing.  They aren’t the Golden Bough.

[This sonnet was first published March 9, 2019.  It was illustrated there:  https://classicalpoets.org/2019/03/09/three-thousands-years-by-phillip-whidden/]

 

                      Thucydides:

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  “Because of the Human Thing”

We forecast both the worst and best because

The human thing is settled in the crux.

Set there like sapphires made to master laws,

This thing assures the rigid rule of flux

Or many faceted uncertainty.

This gemstone is the single perfect shape.

It offers only one uncertainty—

That fixed capriciousness, the living rape

Of would be diamond-pure deep control.

Just as the solitary fact is change,

Its fractals cannot take the arctic pole

Star as their source.  White certitude is strange.

Fate assigned Alcibiades his place,

Uncertainty, disloyalty, disgrace.

 

   To the King of Greece

The past attempts to speak.  It tries to talk
With words and other ruined things like stones
That lie in heaps or carved acanthus stalk
Of leaves in marble.  Sometimes vellum tones
Come up from opened scrolls.  Occasionally
Our history gives a golden squawk,  as when
“The face of Agamemnon” tries to see
Us through its sealed up eyes, we modern men
Who’ll rot beneath the satin lids of coffins, not
With heavy metal masks to hide our truths.
Besides, who’ll come to look for you, a jot
Or tittle to antiquarian sleuths?
..No Schliemann hovers in the future’s skies
….For sending telegrams about our eyes.

   Troy in New Orleans, Manhattan, or London

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So I found “Helen” sitting in a streetcar; the Dionysian revels of her court were transferred to a Metropolitan roof garden with a jazz orchestra;and the katharsis of the fall of Troy I saw approximated in the recent World War. ~ Hart Crane, “General Aims and Theories”

See Helen swaying in a streetcar, or

Perhaps far better, Paris, or the arm,

Or thigh swells of Achilles.  That is for

A poet like Hart Crane who sees no harm

In lusting after harder, mythic males

On buses.  Modern poets must retrace

The ancient Greek tale of a thousand sails

With what we see in a watering place

On Bourbon Street or in the Bronx.  The war

Goes on just south of Troy in Palestine

Millennia later so why not more

Voluptuousness.  Find it in a shrine

Made up of carriages of Tube trains on

The Central Line or in a gay bar’s brawn.

 

 

             True Love

                For Charles Randall Stanfield

 

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“I can never feel certain of any
truth but from a clear perception
of its Beauty.” ~ John Keats

True love is the appreciation of

True beauty like a perfect idea,

Ideals transparent as jewels above

A crown of crystal worn by Sophia

In realms of pale mosaics in a dome,

Or resonances of purity

Like higher mathematics; thus the gnome

Called Plato says.  He wanted surety.

More human looms the notion of Descartes

Who says that love is of the soul when joined

In willingness of feeling with a part

Inside us that is built of splendour groined.

Ortega y Gasset in his book On

    Love says — Or, yes, when weight and flux meet dawn.

 

 

            Twingeing

Faint Orpheus is made of firefly light

And phosphorescent footprints in the sand

Inside Aegean coves of curving white.

He fades and shines like constellations spanned

With stars and planets hidden often by

The clouds of time.   He goes and comes back pale

Like tingling tides of foam on waves that try

To wash the coves a whiter white.  Like hail

He hurts the heart, but then the pangs are gone.

Scarred Orpheus is like a moon that wanes

While reigning.  He appears and then is drawn

Back like a veil made up of rites and pains,

More like a dying moth but one who goes

To chrysalis and comes again in glows.

              Two Men in Love in Death

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“Hector dies, and when at last in Book XXIV his corpse is recovered, it is laid out and Andromache holds Hector’s head in her lap, as Achilles had held Patroclus’.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 112

Achilles cradles his Patroclus’ head

In highest, deepest love and deepest death.

The hero thought he loved him in his bed,

His hero’s hardness hunched with gasping breath,

But how he loved him, just how much he knew

That, had escaped him, well beyond his heart,

Until he held that precious hair and drew

Those sacred curls between his fingers, tart

With grief. When Hector’s body was retrieved,

His wife found only love, a cuddled love

There in her lap, well hatred as she grieved,

Her hatred giving scabs and blood a shove

Away from hair.  Her hate and love were one.

She dared not dwell upon their unharmed son.

                        Ugly Beauty

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You might want to read this sarcastic version of the Greek myth http://www.shmoop.com/echo-narcissus/summary.html

before you read the sonnet.

The music comes from speakers.  Radio

3 broadcasts strains and sounds.  They’re more like stains

Inside the ear and in the air.  They flow

Across the kitchen and they’re more like pains

Especially because they’re meant to be

About Narcissus and about the pink

Pale Echo.  It is a cacophony

Of notes and bangs, a perfume like a stink

Of noises.  It’s true… the ancient myth

Is ugly too, made up of beauty smeared

With agonies.  It is a monolith

Of cruelty and loveliness revered

As only youth can suffer it.  The young

Man, nymph and chords are like a tortured tongue.

Upon the Face of Agamemnon

“and also he [King Priam of Troy] admires Agamemnon for his beauty”

~ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, XIII, 906

Forget that Helen for a moment.  Think

Of gorgeous men.  The King of Troy could not

Resist men’s beauty.  Helen caused a stink

That lasted years and years and it was fraught

With Troy’s death—but don’t forget the king

Of Mycenae.  Old Priam’s eyes fixed on

The royal one of Argos.  Homer had him sing

The wonders of his beauty.  His height, brawn

And other qualities exalted him

Above the other royal heroes.  Some

Stood taller and they might be strong of limb,

But he was of the lot the royal sum.

..Commanding grandeur of the heights, his face

….Gave Agamemnon’s beauty god-like place.

Watered Down Wine and Esthetics

“Gretchen Reydams-Shils (“Myth and Poetry in the Timaeus“) deals with Socrates’ puzzling remark that his description of an ideal state was like a painting.” ~ http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/plato-and-the-poets/

Socrates’ description of the ideal

State being like a painting makes us laugh.

It’s like a macho soldier with a squeal-

Like giggle, or an extra tall giraffe

That disapproves of using long, long necks

For grazing in the upper regions of

The trees across the veldt.  Things complex

As strict philosophy, esthetics, love,

And all the stuff great thinkers try to cope

With tempt the Platos of this world to use

Mimesis, so it seems.  That makes a dope

Of him.  Perhaps he had too much of watered booze

The night before.  That’s all.  If he had thought,

He might have been more careful how he taught.

Were I to Believe in Angels’ Songs

If angels, each one, had a message they

Would sing to us, would each charge be the same,

A Kyrie, an Adoramus te,

Or Gloria?  No, that would be too tame.

I’m thinking every one would be unique,

Each text and melody enough to slake

A different desert thirst.  Homeric Greek

Combined with Mendelssohn-like flow would make

One part of us reverberate, that long

Symphonic sweep fulfilling our dry veins,

But then perhaps a shift to Hip Hop song

Would be required to serenade our stains.

This much I know.  Each angel snowflake text

Would leave us feeling unfulfilled and vexed.

        What We Drink

Who wants thick wisdom first in poems?  It

Is ours for chewing in the pleasures of

The scrolls of Plato, thinkers who permit

The thought that pleasure proves the point of love,

And stern philosophers with guts to kill

All weakness, straight.  The cup of hemlock comes

And they are strong.  They drink.  They do not spill.

The use of poetry with pretty thrums

On mandolins in minds and hairy chests

Is first for some, perhaps a very few.

Philosophy dwells.  Poetry arrests.

It seizes arteries and gives their view.

..Just that is what we want from poets first.

….We want the slaking of the heart’s own thirst.

Where Cleanest Vaulting Beauty Flies

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“Youths and maidens all blythe and full of glee, carried the

luscious fruit in plaited baskets; and with them there went a

boy who made sweet music with his lyre, and sang the

Linos- song with clear boyish voice.”

~ Samuel Butler’s English version of The Iliad, Book XVIII)

Before the voices in the English choirs

Of churches and cathedrals, there was sound

As pure as heaven’s see-through streets, then spires

Of Oxford singing, and its chapels crowned

Within by treble obligatos there

Above in fan-like carvings in white stone,

Just like the colored bosses in the air,

The air made lovely by that realm of tone,

The air made holy by that purity

Of melody above the other parts

Of lower, underpinned maturity.

Since ancient times this highness reached our hearts.

..The early Greeks and Anglicans each learned

….Where tallest sounding lovelinesses burned.

           Presumption

Who teaches us what love is, what it means?
Who?  No one.  Many try, but none of them
Succeeds.  Some say it’s like quick benzedrines
Without inhalers needed.  Bethlehem
Is touted as another meaning of
This principle or feeling—whatever.
In this proposal Calvary is love,
The birth and death bound in one endeavor.
Philosophers trot out their thoughts and words
From Plato to the end of time and pop
Songs formulate love as tunes of trapped birds
Vibrating in want of a man on top.
..Some say that friend or brother love is best.
….Why teach us what we learned at mother’s breast?

Widescreen, 3D, Surround

 Sound, Buttered Popcorn

    and Icy Coca-Cola®

“It follows from the fact that poets do not have knowledge of that about which they speak, but aim to seem as though they do, and some listeners do not realize that poets lack knowledge.” ~ http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/plato-and-the-poets/

A poet writes a line that sends hot ice

Across the scalp.  The reader does not care

About some fact obscured.  She wants a slice

Of thrill.  It’s like a movie made to scare

Us.  Horror is the point.  We want a taste

Of love, a titbit on the tongue.  Is that

So bad that Plato’s thinking has to waste

Itself condemning it?  He spits his splat

Of thoughtful mucus on our human need

For entertainment.  Plato did not know

Of screens in multiplexes.  His slow speed

Imagined just one cave with walls which glow

With palest light and shadows in the mix,

A vision that Sony Pictures® can fix.

    With Straight Gold Bars

I sat beside my mother as the sale
Was made, the purchase of The World Book
Encyclopedia.   I loved the pale
Cream, knobbled leatherette, the noble look
Of deep maroon square placed on spine of each
Restrained and heavy volume, glossy leaves
Of shining color visuals—the reach
Of all in classic beauty as the eaves
Of widened wonder.  Suddenly at school
My fourth-grade teacher gave us each a myth
From ancient Greece to tell.  We had the tool,
My mother and her little boy, so with
Me at her side we found Icarus who
Defied the gods and father— and who flew!

  Beside the Thousand Ships

There once were times when men could hold large pride

In having sons who had as lovers men

That gods could hate and love — and take their side

In gut-strewn battle.  Fathers nodded when

Their sons retired to tents and to the love

Of those divinely made, so beautiful

That poets would extol such strength above

The softnesses of women.  Dutiful

To manly thighs that urge devotion to

A high-born hero, bed-mates in these times

Commanded soldiers’ reverence.  These few

Like Patroklus produced loud tacit chimes

That caused the camp to shout a winked hurrah

Beyond a bride, cheers filled with manly awe.

               Πιερία Pieria

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Pieria was laid with plains and peaks,

The highest one Olympus, when the gods

Set forth the world.  Poseidon’s seashore speaks

And gives Pieria glossed dolphin pods.

Olympus speaks still, too, if we revere

The gods or what they stand for when the best

Of them shine out across the sea.  No fear

Of them exists now.  Jesus has suppressed

Their goodness and frivolities.  The ridge,

Pierius, was once the home of song

Since Muses built their artful nine-fold bridge

From it and Orpheus embattled wrong

From here, death’s wrong.  He made this land the start

Of music, poetry, and god-like art.

 

by phillipw | Jun 17, 2020 | Uncategorized | 0 comments