Hi everyone!   Please welcome our guest host for today’s Poetics, Dora from PilgrimDreams. ~Grace

Reading on the Garden’s Path (Albert Aublet, 1883

Welcome to Tuesday Poetics! This is Dora from PilgrimDreams. Like many of you, I’ve been much entertained by “the aged Librarian,” a Borges-like figure that reappears in our very own Björn Rudberg’s poetry. For those of us at the dVerse pub who can hardly pass a day without opening the covers of a well-worn book or a newly minted one and whiling away the hours, there’s nothing more calculated to inspire us than a labyrinthine library with its resident librarian whose “books are mirrors.”

So we’re in a bookish mood this All Hallows Eve, though outside our doors little ghouls and ghosts may prowl to scare up tricks or treats. Indoors we’re scaring up poetry written by the dead – dead poets, that is – in praise of books, books that have opened up whole new worlds and inspired the creation of countless others.

In October 1816, the Romantic poet John Keats composed a sonnet about how profoundly he was affected by reading a translation of Homer by the Elizabethan playwright George Chapman.

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

When Shakespeare’s works had fallen into short-lived obscurity, that poet of poets John Milton in order to revive interest wrote a famous tribute for the 2nd Folio in 1630 that immortalizes Milton as much as his revered subject.

On Shakespeare

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a live-long monument.
For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;
And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

Frontispiece to Milton, Source

William Blake, with his usual metaphysical panache, in his turn wrote an epic poem celebrating Milton (written and illustrated between 1804 and 1810) in which its hero is Milton himself “who returns from Heaven and unites with the author to explore the relationship between living writers and their predecessors, and to undergo a mystical journey to correct his own spiritual errors.” (Wikipedia)

As we enter the modernist era, the tone shifts dramatically, less reverence and more melancholy, but the familiar celebration of the dead writer’s immortality through art. Twentieth century poet W.H. Auden wrote these lines regarding Yeats’s poetry soon after his death. From In Memory of W.B. Yeats, part II:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Frontispiece to the 1831 Frankenstein, Source

Today being Halloween, we cannot fail to remember Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the creator of the most famous horror story of them all, Frankenstein. She was still mourning the drowning death of her husband poet Percy Bysse Shelley in 1822 when she wrote of the sympathetic effect of reading William Wordsworth whose emotions in part mirrored her own.

“On Reading Wordsworth’s Lines on Peele Castle”

It is with me, as erst with you,
Oh poet, nature’s chronicler,
The summer seas have lost their hue
And storm sits brooding everywhere.

The gentlest rustling of the deep
Is but the dirge of him I lost,
And when waves raise their furrows steep,
And bring foam in which is tossed.

A voice I hear upon the wind
Which bids me haste to join him there,
And woo the tempest’s breath unkind
Which gives to me a kindred bier.

And when all smooth are ocean’s plains
And sails afar are glittering,
The fairest skiff his form contains
To my poor heart’s fond picturing.

Then wildly to the beach I rush,
And fain would seize the frailest boat,
And from dull earth the slight hull push,
On dancing waves towards him to float.

“Nor may I e’er again behold
The sea, and be as I have been;
My bitter grief will ne’er grow old,
Nor say I this with mind serene.”

For oft I weep in solitude
And shed so many bitter tears,
While on past joys I vainly brood
And shrink in fear from coming years.

So then, your challenge today, given our bookish yet macabre mood, is to choose a dead novelist or poet, one whom you have recently read or is simply a favorite, and write a poem on a work of theirs. Perhaps their writing has acted as a mirror, or a catalyst that has moved you, or caused you to think in ways that shook you out of your complacency, maybe even provoked you, or drew your deep admiration. Or you can write of how it affected you on a personal level during a difficult time, maybe even changed your outlook on life. You can also write on discovering a novelist or poet whose effect was immediate and influential.

Once you’ve written your poem, please include beneath it just a few lines about the work or author/poet you’ve chosen, and a few representative lines for those of us who may not be familiar with their work. (Goodreads.com has a nice compilation of readers’ favorite quotes.)

That’s it, my friends. The literary world’s your oyster. Let your poetic juices flow.

If you are new to dVerse and/our Poetics, here is how to join in:

• Write a poem in response to the challenge.
• Enter a link directly to your poem and your name by clicking Mr. Linky below,
  and remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy.
• You will find links to other poets and more will join so please do check
  back later in order to read their poems.
• Read and comment on other poets’ work– we all come here to have our poems read.
• Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog.

About our guest blogger, Dora A-K:

Marianne Moore likened poetry to “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” and that phrase has stuck with me since I first read them as a teenager, describing perfectly what poets try to create. Now writing has also become a sort of therapy for me, an outlet for the chronic pain and stress of RA. But at its best, poetry is like prayer, which as the 17th-century poet George Herbert put it, is “church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,/The land of spices; something understood.” Find me at PilgrimDreams.com.