A Diptych on Affairs

One of my favourite types of posts I write on this blog are the diptychs and triptychs. In art, a diptych is a piece created on two panels--often a painting on wood, but sometimes a carving on ivory--joined together by a hinge. With the artwork inside, it opens and closes like a book. Triptychs are the same, but done in threes--they have a very large centre panel with two smaller wings, connecting to the centre panel by hinges and folding in to protect it. Both diptychs and triptychs are an important genre in medieval European religious painting, where they were used to tell stories of the Scriptures and the saints.

Originally, diptychs were a writing tablet made of two panels joined together, the standard notebook of the ancient Mediterranean. For my own purposes, I use diptych and triptych to refer to a pair or trio of poems which tell a story when read together. As homage to the diptych as a form of visual art, I like to use a photograph as a hinge between the poems. If I have taken, or can find, other photographs that continue the story, these serve as the outer panels.

 

Previous diptychs and triptychs have featured: hope, snow, snowdrops, love, the class of 2021, and negative people. Here is one on affairs.

 

A Note on Intellectuals

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say

    Is a keen observer of life,

The word Intellectual suggests straight away

    A man who's untrue to his wife.

~ W.H. Auden, reprinted in Essential Poems for the Way We Live Now, edited by Daisy Goodwin (London, 2003) 

"Walking away" by Braiu is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

'I, being born a woman and distressed'

I, being born a woman and distressed

By all the needs and notions of my kind,

Am urged by your propinquity to find

Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

To bear your body's weight upon my breast:

So subtly is the fume of life designed,

To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,

And leave me once again undone, possessed.

Think not for this, however, the poor treason

Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,

I shall remember you with love, or season

My scorn with pity,--let me make it plain:

I find this frenzy insufficient reason

For conversation when we meet again.

 

~ Edna St Vincent Millay, reprinted in Poetry by Heart ed. Andrew Motion (London, 2016)