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.]