The Wreckage of Empires

Stretching my definition of 'modern poems about late antiquity and the Middle Ages' here to include the poem 'Mutatis Mutandis' by Sean O'Brien, a magnificent response to the Aeneid. Virgil bookends the poem, with mention of the sorrowing queen waiting for news that never comes at the beginning, and the references to Troy and Carthage at the end. But the stories of the end of the world in the middle of the poem echo other Classical and late antique stories of the apocalypse, and the image of the stones of the world splitting apart reminds me of the tenth-century historian Adam of Bremen. 

 

With its short, sharp lines with their self-contained stories--new seas arise from the wreckage of empires, and settle, and still; this reads like a poem that could inspire an epic fantasy novel. I for one, would want to read a novel that began with the epigraph, The gods never speak of us. Wouldn't you?

MUTATIS MUTANDIS

The steersman is lost and the hole he has made
In the water has swallowed his cry and healed over.
The curious fishes must make what they can
From his bones, or the great whale may vomit him up
On the shore, at the feet of a queen who stands
Waiting and waiting through moon after moon
With no news and no rumours but only her sorrow
For company. Maritime cities are burned
To the waterline, plague passes north
Like an army of phantoms by night, and volcanoes
Roar out from Pole to equator, while the stones of the world
Break open and swallow each other, and darkness
Closes over the face of the water, and new seas arise
From the wreckage of empires, and settle, and still.

At the third stroke the time will be nothing at all,
The time of un-dreaming, when rivers and language
Are locked in the ice, when the eye and the ear have grown
Weary of seeing and hearing. The play and the music are over.
The desert gives way to the desert and heaven’s high quarrels
Have found a new venue. The gods never speak of us.
We must wake into this poisoned sleep and gather
Our rag-and-bone birthright about us and wait
Until somebody hears herself talking and says it again
And somebody beats on a drum with the bone of an auroch
And finds that the rhythm becomes an opinion
And then with the same bone sketches a line in the sand
As the blizzards melt back to the poles and a fire is lit
That all men will know of, and worship, or fear.

So many waves of desire, dynasties, fetishes,
Novel barbarians out of the inexhaustible East.
Inquisitors are always on their way, and at one time
All this was just fields, where the cemeteries grow
From the bones of the infantry, forests of marble
In which we may seek after wisdom, pursuing
The fugitive spirit of things as it slips through the silent
Ranks of those King Death conscripted for a host
The like of which has not been seen by men or gods –
And in whose vanguard, Goddess, you and I both ride
With fire and sword, because it must be so:
The ocean and the mountain and the fire at the core
Demand it. Why else do we lay siege once more to Troy
Or Carthage, or whatever this place will be called?

~ Sean O'Brien, The Beautiful Librarians (London, 2015)