Winter happens like a secret

I found this poem in January 2022 and have been saving it to post on the shortest day of the year. For me it captures the beauty in the bleakness of this time of year. And the language! 'Winter happens like a secret we've to keep yet never understand' feels like the core of a fairy tale. 

Beautiful. Happy Solstice, friends.

At the Solstice

We say Next time we’ll go away.
But then the winter happens, like a secret

We’ve to keep yet never understand,
As daylight turns to cinema once more:

A lustrous darkness deep in ice-age cold,
And the print in need of restoration

Starting to consume itself
With snowfall where no snow is falling now.

"Winter Solstice 2014" by Jon Bunting is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Or could it be a cloud of sparrows, dancing
In the bare hedge that this gale of light

Is seeking to uproot? Let it be sparrows, then,
Still dancing in the blazing hedge,

Their tender fury and their fall,
Because it snows, because it burns.

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

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)

Barbarians don't get me

I'm currently working on a review of a book called Latin Poetry and its Reception, written in honour of recently retired University of British Columbia professor Susanna Braund. Braund's research, and the essays in her festschrift, focuses on histories of translation and reception--the movement of Greek ideas into Latin poetry, Classical ideas into later Latin poetry, and the way that various modern authors play with the work of their Classical counterparts (especially Virgil). It's, excuse my language, a bitch of a review to write--I was not trained as a Classicist and my knowledge of Classical poets has been gained mostly through their reception in late antiquity. Which means that my review will miss some tricks evaluating the quality of the articles alongside their contributions and gaps.

I chose to review the book because I thought it was a great learning opportunity (and it has been)--the sheer range of the essays means I've encountered lots of ideas and authors new to me. Because I've been thinking so much about scholarship on reception of the Classics, I've started to notice Classical receptions absolutely everywhere, especially in the poetry I've been reading this month. 

 

Here's one of the funniest poems that's found me. Some background, to aid your appreciation of it: Ovid (43 BCE-17/18 CE) was an extremely successful and popular Roman poet, but was banished by the emperor Augustus in the year 8 CE. Based on comments Ovid makes in his later writings, scholars have guessed that the poet's racy Ars Amatoria, which includes poems about adultery, offended Augustus, who pursued a programme of legislation promoting moral reform, including legislation encouraging monogamous marriage. There are also some hints that Ovid might have been involved or known about a plot against the emperor. The incompleteness and ambiguity of the evidence has fueled endless scholarly debate.

 

Tomis, the town on the Black Sea where Ovid spent the last ten years of his life, is in modern day Romania, and was far removed from the cosmopolitan life the poet had enjoyed in Rome. Our knowledge of Ovid's banishment (and his feelings about it) comes from the poems and letters he wrote from Tomis pleading to come home.

 

I really like the image of him singing the blues about it all.

"Howlin George Blues singer" by keith ellwood is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Damn Right I Got the Blues: Ovid Live in Tomis

1.

I hate to see that Euxine sun go down

I hate to see that Euxine sun go down

Cause Lord it reminds me that for reasons of state

I been exiled and confined to this one-horse Pontic town.

 

2.

Ain't but one way out Caesar, but I just can't go out the door

Ain't but one way out Caesar, from this cell-block on the shore

Waited ten years for your letter, Oh Lord I'm waiting still

Barbarians don't get me than the ennui surely will

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