Posts tagged there really should be stanzas here
Posts tagged there really should be stanzas here
“Let us call now for the makers of strong images,
Let them come to us now carrying quills and sharp razors
Let them gash their arms for ink and let them limn.
Look at them tracing their desperation, the makers of strong images
Look at their ink clotting brown and black on the parchment skin
Look: they render us down there limb from limb.”
Neil Gaiman, from “The Song of the Audience” in Angels and Visitations.
I love these opening stanzas because they make visceral the contract between the audience and writer. I may need to open a vein and bleed on the page in order to entertain you, but I will structure my story out of your bones.
“I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
T.S. Eliot, the closing stanzas of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
I get chills every time I read that final line.
“She sleeps now, her cold breasts
Dandled by undertow,
Her hair lifted and laid.
Undulant slow seawracks
Cast about shin and thigh,
Bangles of wort, drifting
Liens catch, dislodge gently.
This is the first great sleep
Of homecoming, eight
Land years between hearth and
Bed steeped and dishevelled.
Her magic garment al-
most ocean-tinctured still.”
Seamus Heaney, the opening to “Maighdean Mara”
Just once in my life I would like to write a sentence as fucking brilliant as “Her magic garment al-/most ocean-tinctured still.”
“The moon is a pearl in the mist and sets the scene.
Comfort seems within reach, just over there,
But rocks, water, and darkness intervene.
Incalculable dangers lie between
Us and the warmth of bedding, the fire’s flare.
The moon is a pearl in the mist and sets the scene;”
Anthony Hecht, from “Nocturne: A Recurring Dream.”
It is, of course, a villanelle. And I am still looking for omens.
“Handmaid to Cybele,
she is a Dactyl, a
tangle-haired leap-taking
hot Corybantica.
Torch-light & cymbal-strikes
scamper along with her.
Kniving & shouting, she
heads up her dancing girls’
streaming sorority, glamorous
over the forested slopes of Mt. Ida.”
Marie Ponsot, from “Drunk & Disorderly, Big Hair” collected in Springing
That poem I just quoted gets even better, by the way. Marie Ponsot is, aside from being a genius, 91. She is still writing. “Drunk & Disorderly, Big Hair” is some of her more recent work. I want to be her when I grow up. I also want to be the woman in this poem.
“The Witch gave a squawk; her venomous body
Melted into light as water leaves a spring,
And the high green hill sits always by the sea.
At his crossroads, too, the Ancient prayed for me;
Down his wasted cheeks tears of joy were running:
My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely.
He kissed me awake and no one was sorry;
The sun shone on sales, eyes, pebbles, anything,
And the high green hill sits always by the sea.”
W. H. Auden, from “Miranda,” in The Sea and the Mirror
I love so much of this. The poem is a villanelle, and I have such a fondness for structured poetry - the balance between rules and art is a liminal space, full of freedom. And The Sea and the Mirror is a retelling of my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest. Auden cracks the play open, and shows its beating heart, and then resurrects it.
