Bacchanal

[kalypso_v]

This is for fengirl88: it's the song of a Maenad and springs from our trip to see the Almeida Bakkhai. There were many remarkable things about that production, but the most stunning for me was Bertie Carvel's Agave; he convinced me completely that I was seeing

Comments

[jhall1]

I think that's very good. There seems to my ear to be something wrong with the last lines of verses 4-6, though. One too many syllables?

[kalypso_v]

At one point it had a very definite metre, but that was feeling too jolly, so I threw it out and just went with eight syllables, whatever the beat. Technically the last line of verse six has nine, but I was thinking of "river" as being swallowed into one; I think that's one where the beat swayed me.

[vjezkova]

This sounds very authentic to me. The bacchanalia were really terribly wild orgy...leaving even dead and mutilated...drugged men and women, not only drunk, is this right?
You have definitely a great "feel" for it. Not that I know a lot about it...

[kalypso_v]

Very violent! You know, I first came across the maenads in C. S. Lewis's Prince Caspian, when they turn up after the liberation of Narnia, and Bacchus is described thus: "His face would have been almost too pretty for a boy’s if it had not looked so extremely wild. You felt, as Edmund said when he saw him a few days later, ‘There’s a chap who might do anything - absolutely anything.’" Eventually Lucy and Susan work out who they are, and their reaction is "‘I wouldn’t have felt very safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we’d met them without Aslan.’"