Baby's First Death Poem
from arthurian_icons
Well, I didn't want to do another Fifty Book Challenge Entry so soon, even though I finished the His Dark Materials trilogy over spring break. And I'm not organized enough to have the Quotes of the Semester yet. So I'm going to post this poem I wrote for my Divas of Poetry class. Everybody was bitching about having to write in form, but I was like, "That's cool; I write in form anyway." There also ended up being a lot of alliteration I didn't know was there initially. Kathy Barbour says I'm naturally a sound poet.
And, because you're all so special to me, you're getting the annotated version.
I started out trying to write something totally different for this. I spent a day trying to do a sonnet about something completely different. Then I decided, screw the sonnet. But I still came out with nothing. Then I started to panic. I got afraid that I'd not written creatively for so long that I'd lost It. I'd been abandoned by my muse, or what have you. That's where the first few lines came from, and it turned out, that's all I needed to unlock it again. The rest just flowed from there. I'd just been having a conversation with
celtic_songster about Arthurian legend, particularly Tennyson, so that's where all of those allusions came from. I had Tennyson and his concept of the artist/mage on my mind. "I am Merlin and I am dying" is from Tennyson's poem "Merlin and the Gleam," and all the rest of the poem draws heavily on "The Lady of Shalott," her tower, her mirror, and her embroidery. The harp and well and cave came from Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy. The silver bells from Thomas the Rhymer and various fairy abduction stories.
When I was little, I always thought that the second verse of "Rainbow Connection" summed up my muses perfectly: "Have you been half asleep/ And have you heard voices?/ I hear them calling my name/ Are they the sweet sounds/ That called the old sailors?/ I think they're one and the same." I've thought of them in those terms ever since. So that's echoed in here.
The sea imagery and the reference to Sappho came out of a poet I'd been studying, Sara Teasdale. She wrote several beautiful poems about Sappho, and lots and lots of sea poems-- the one in particular I was thinking of was about not wanting to be near the wild sea that bore Iseult and Helen. And when I think Iseult and the sea, I think seagulls. I'm not sure why, though it might be something from Bernard Cornwell's trilogy. I also did a project in Women in Fiction I was very proud of about women and metaphorical cages. Others saw a Lord of the Rings reference there, but it wasn't intended. It was intended with the vision of the great wave "coming on, darkness inescapable." That conversation between Eowyn and Faramir is one of my favorite parts of the trilogy, second only to the next conversation between Eowyn and Faramir.
It was around this point that I looked up at the top of my poem and realized I'd done kind of a "ubi sunt" thing, and that made me think of rediscovering "The Wanderer" while I was studying comps. This is an Old English poem that basically defines that motif. It has several verses of hwear cwom-- the "Where are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?" Tolkien uses comes from there. So, having gone that far, I decided to go full-on with it. The image of the horse and the rider, actually, brought me nicely back to "The Lady of Shalott," and the image of Lancelot to the rescue. Only he's not. The Lady of Shalott is a lady in a tower, just like Rapunzel, and I remembered my Women in Fiction class, wherein we studied fairytales, when I wrote the bit about "no knight and no tresses, no stairway, no door."
Finally, the pinned butterfly comes from a David Lohr play-- one in his Thorne and Mulcahy series, which he was thinking of revising and having us do, and which I really wanted to do, though it never happened. I think the play as I read it was called "The Butterfly," and Melissa is talking to a murder victim (it's a dream sequence) about her death, and says, "You were a butterfly, trapped, watching your life telescoping outward." That image has stayed with me ever since. And finally finally, the stepping through the mirror came partly from the unfinished novel I won NaNoWriMo with the other year, "World Without End," in which mirrors are passages into other worlds, and partly from a paper I did on the mirror in Tennyson and Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, arguing that the world inside the mirror is the creative world of the artist.
There's also a little minor imagery I can trace back to The Mists of Avalon and Jane Eyre-- specifically, the drawings Jane shows Rochester. And my portrayal of Tiresias in "Oedipus" this year. I think I've actually shared a lot about myself with this explication, which wasn't realy intended, but oh well. I want to have this so that I can remember it all later. This poem turned into a sort of cumulative experience for me, drawing on my last four years as an English major. It was very fitting that I wrote it at the end of my college career. And I'm proud of it.
This poem is all about the artist's fear, which I should think we all have, of losing our gifts before we lose our lives. And a dramatic interpretation of what happens should that occur. (What if the Lady of Shalott doesn't die after leaving her tower, for example, but comes back and sees what she's done?) It's the first poem I've written involving the motif of death, and when I was trying to come up with a title for it, I joked with Michael that it should be called "Baby's First Death Poem." However, I finally titled it "The Artist Returns to Her Bower," the short version of the longer (and, it turned out, more popular) title "The Artist Returns to Her Bower to Find Death Has Been There Before Her." Enjoy.
"Where have my words gone?-- Where is the singing?
Where are the muses who lulled me to sleep
With soft, wind-blown voices and silver bells ringing
And snatches of poetry out of the deep
Oceans and forests and caves, from the ages
Deep-sunk in time into memories long
Faded to shadow, to impotent rages
Grief turned to sadness, and sadness to song?"
You say, "I am Merlin;" you cry, "I am dying.
Oh, where is my mirror? And where is my loom?
I left them just yesterday. Here they were lying
Beside harp and well in the sanctified room.
This is not my work. My miror's unbroken,
Clear as the crystal concealed in the cave,
Throbbing the heartbeat of all words unspoken--
It only reflected the light that I gave."
Go to the window, then! Hear the waves breaking!
See the clouds gather and feel the storm rise!
Stand! Dread the vision, the last of your making:
The great wave, the silence, the dull, empty eyes.
"So where is my horse, then? Where the knight riding?"
Listen! Do you hear the horns from the hills?
Or is that the call of the gulls who are gliding
Free of the tower, the quiet that kills?
Yet still they are weeping-- gulls wail to the sea wind.
"Do they call for me, then? Can I, too, take wing?
And if not? A butterfly's death-- fall and be pinned?"
You wonder-- "Did Sappho think much the same thing?"
The bower is shaking, the well flowing over.
No knight and no tresses, no stairway, no door.
You gather the tatters embroidered with lovers.
Alone, you were never so lonely before.
"A last song," you think, and you draw the glass nearer.
Just four walls and silence and nothing to do
But stare at the shapes gleaming dim in the mirror.
If it had not cracked, you could surely step through...