The drops of water come on down; No sequence clear in it is found, Nor yet enough that they might drown Who would depart from this surround.
Xarpo is just passing through She says, and does not mean to do So much here, as some might rue. Soon Jack will bring in something new.
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I struggle so to buy a gift For one I love to him uplift For though I’ve loved him his life long I am away where I belong And know not how to meet his need Which of his wants I ought to heed
I’m not so good at gift-wrapping as this. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Yet this demand I will not fail And from the task I will not quail I will a fitting gift select And celebration thus perfect That comes each year in coming days I will somehow find a way
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Feeling weak as
I see the surging muscles
Swelling with flexion
Blood-fueled and
Throbbing as sweat cascades and
Heavy panting at the
Exertions little clad
I remain
Swathed opaquely
Struggling with heavy things in
Hands cramping to hold onto them
Pushing again and again but
Having them surge at my face
At least as often
The others give but passing glances
I turn away from them in shame and
Envy at what they have with seeming ease
While I yet labor for what I never had
And hope perhaps in vain my
Striving amid the smells of oil and sweat
Bodies growing unwashed and glorious
May yet win for me
If there is a race
It has long since passed me by
And even the dust kicked up has
Fallen back to earth
While clouds catch the fading sunlight and
Stars start winking out from the
Spreading cloak of coming night
Drawn to cover the bodies anew
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The opening salvos have been fired And the new soldiers have been hired To stand at the front and face the horde That, not sated by the board That showed them plenty yesterday, At a new altar hopes to pray.
May this offering meet with approval, O, Mammon! Photo by Jack Sparrow on Pexels.com
The blasts, resounding, echo yet As that bleak army incurs debt To press ahead in its campaign Against who against it complain But do not act. They lift no hand To meet or thwart the war’s demand.
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My throat grows hoarse for how I have long raged.
My heart is heavy; it seldom is assuaged.
Attention falters when plays are too long staged,
And knuckles bleed that rap upon the doors
Forever closed, and I can do no more
Than I have done. I may have thought before
That I might move some hearts and minds to me,
To fight against the Stupid God to free
Those from it who would gladly from it flee,
But striving that I do seems all in vain.
That those who want to flee it have is plain;
The rest seem with it happy to remain.
They dance and sing, an orgy of delight
They carry on amid the spreading night.
Consider the kindling. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
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Though she will never read these lines I write,
I yet would have near me day and night;
Though years have passed, I still thrill at the sight
Of her. How could I not? But more I thrill
That she remains yet with me, good and ill,
And more the latter, has not had her fill
And passed on by, as many might well do.
For all that I have given cause to rue
Accepting life with me, she carries through,
Abiding my unthinking in seeming ease.
No wonder, then, that I hope her to please
With word and deed. That tempest is a breeze
I face with her. It is an easy life
I lead in leading it beside my wife.
Do I queue up James Taylor? Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
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I see her as she stands upon the stage,
Doing as she’s done since tender age,
And see for her a future to assuage
The fears I feel for her in every day.
She knows them little, goes outside to play,
Goes to school, goes to church to pray,
And thinks but little of what can go wrong,
Running, laughing, lifting voice in song.
My own prayer is that it will be long
Ere her young heart, to its hurt, will be touched.
I know we live in a harsh world, and such
A place can wreak great harm on all, and much
Of my concern is that she may yet smile.
O! May she be a little girl a while!
Not mine, but you get the idea. Photo by Jill Wellington on Pexels.com
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A while back, I worked with a tutoring client to draft a response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun,” and I wrote a post about how I went about helping the client that provided my own example of that kind of work. (Find it here.) In that post, I note similarities between the client’s assignment and the often-taught Marlowe-Raleigh-Donne sequence (“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” and “The Bait”), and in recent days, I had occasion to revisit my post on the Shakespearean subject. I was reminded of the events then discussed, and it occurred to me that it might be a useful exercise to put myself in the position of Donne to the already-existing Raleigh, the rebuttal to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me prov’d, I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
My rebuttal thereto reads
You never writ, nor no man ever loved, If love is never love that, finding change, Stays as it is when it first ever moved Or strives not living patterns to arrange In hopes of bringing its love to the mark That looks on tempests and is not shaken. No, use will change the shape of every bark That plies the waves, whatever standard’s taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, oh no, but is its flow’r And fruit that ripens not all in one go, But in its season and appointed hour If tended well, made better, and let grow. No thing that is made better stays the same, And stasis gives the lie to goodness’s claim.
Following the pattern, to make this work, I’ll need to continue to use the Shakespearean sonnet structure of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet, with a (somewhat shaded) turn into the couplet. Too, to stand in place of Donne in response to Raleigh, I will need to put myself in position to flirt with the narrator of the rebuttal–something, to follow the Shakespearean example, like making a pass at Beatrice after she has rebuffed Benedick. Further, the dominant metaphor will need to shift fairly substantially; Marlowe and Raleigh work in the pastoral, while Donne pivots to angling, so I would need to move from the nautical and agrarian to something else, entirely.
Farming and boating are both active, engaged ways to make a living. A deviation from that would be something like my once-intended line of work: professing the humanities. Fortunately, I know enough about doing that (or convinced at least a few people that I did) that I can discuss it convincingly. Too, the narrator being addressed has to be considered; what does such a narrator de/value? The rebuttal is a rebuke of hubris, the conceit on Shakespeare’s part that he is able to universalize in such a way as he purports to do; so much must be avoided in the new poem (to the extent possible, knowing as I do that there is arrogance in any act of writing, something of the “I have important things to say and you need to read them“). I fancy, as well, that the rebutting narrator values growth and change, which does raise the possibility of leaving things behind (which Shakespeare’s narrator really cannot consider with love as a set constant).
With such in mind, I come up with the following:
In no minds’ marriage would I interfere, Nor yet presume to speak of such with you, Who, though in but a moment, has made clear What thoughts are held on how to carry through A life of love. Instead, I turn a page I’ve read before and read again the words I have long known, and in my later age I hear in them what I’d not in youth heard. So may love be, itself a constant thing That is itself and e’er itself remains, While those who fall to Time’s long sickle’s swing Will alter in what they will from it gain. The book is open; read whoever will, And in the reading by love be well filled.
I hope the reading pleases.
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I do so love a chilly clear morning The moon off full staring silently down At crisping grass waving gently silvered In the quiet before the world wakes
That’s no battle station… Photo by Ben Mack on Pexels.com
It never lasts Arien running her appointed course as Tilion dallies yet again And the books demand my attention as they ever do Where a steaming mug awaits
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Elliott RWI 