I am ambivalent about getting up on this virtual soapbox and ranting away like some silly sidewalk prophet. But so it goes. This one, "?," is fairly recent.
?
This is the end
The end of days
Of hours and powers
And senseless sleep.
?
This is the end
The end of days
Of hours and powers
And senseless sleep.
This is the time
To stop the clock
And tell the seconds
Till they're gone.
This is the day
To grasp the sun
And paint it black
And watch it fade.
This the bed
Of nails you made
To lay yourself
Upon and rest.
To lay yourself
Upon and rest.
This is the path
Through forests of night
And over tombs
Of trembling dead.
This is the bell
That tolls for thee
In every halting
Hissing breath.
This is the dust
That drives the wind
And wears your body
Down to bone.
This is the stream
Become the flood
Of blood now pounding
In your ears.
This is the year
Of drought and plague
That rides in screams
Of locusts' wings.
This is the hot coal
That lies on your tongue
The fire from the sky
That scorches your bowels.
This is heaven
Torn down from on high
This is hell
Dragged up to the light.
This is the sound
Of the fury set free
This is the agony
This is the way.
This is the quest
And the question...?
Here is your first comment Justin! Not sure what to say of this heavy poem from the prophet, but I like very much the simple design of this blog. Very easy to read and well suited for your poem and prose.
ReplyDeleteI really like the wicked darkness of this poem. While not a ballad, I am reminded of my favorite stanza by f Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
ReplyDeleteLike one, that on a lonely road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turn'd round, walks on
And turns no more his head:
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread
If I might, I have a comment regarding the sound of your piece. I notice that the stanza which begins "This is the hot coal/That lies on your tongue" there is a shift away from the iambic tetrameter structure of the poem to that point. And from here down, you have chosen to add more syllables, seemingly in order to build the piece into a crescendo. However, I don't feel a sense of audio resolution in the final stanza (or what I believe is the true final stanza of the poem):
This is the sound
Of the fury set free
This is the agony
This is the way.
I'm wondering about this shift and whether there is a subtle relationship to the content I'm not picking up on?
Again, great piece.
Hey Jambafish, thank you for the comment. Regarding the shift in structure: It was a semi-conscious movement, I think, driven primarily by the need to to build the "prophetic urgency" of of the poem as it rolled towards finale. Blake was a master of this, I think. In so many of his poems, you can feel the energy grow and grow and grow, and soon his lines (some of them septameters, by golly) become so packed with sound and sense that it spills over, extends. The ninth Night of The Four Zoas is all about this.
ReplyDeleteSo, the lines and the sounds had to become more flexible in order to capture and drive the imagery. Think of timpani drums in an orchestra, slowly slowly rumbling below the melody and then building building until they explode. At the same time, though, the "sound" in my poem is not quite sacrificed to the ideas, since the language (words and letters) is still playing with and on itself a lot. See especially the final couplet.
Anyway, cheers!!!