Helen

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees unmoved,
God’s daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

– H. D.

Postscript:

In some ways, the tragedy of Helen was that she was no more than an object, a possession, a casus belli through the course of her life; born of an act of violence, kidnapped at a young age, then fought over. It seems such a waste – all the men that died, all those years of war, all over a woman. Then again, did anyone ask her? There are multiple conflicting versions of the story and of Helen’s complicity, read here and here. You can read various takes on the poem here.

H.D., as Hilda Doolittle preferred to sign her work, was an Imagist, a feminist and an iconoclast. You can read more about her life here and here.

Tagged: , , , , , ,

Published:
August 8, 2011 – 08:00
Author:
By Madhu
Categories:
Comments:
None

Romantics

Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann

The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth-century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.

– Lisel Mueller

Postscript:

I like how this poem brings alive how small gestures could have a great deal of symbolism in a time when manners dictated restraint in public – the flash of an ankle, a dropped fan were all matters of import. The final image we’re left with is melancholy and lovely (“sad and lavish”, as she says) – roses, a garden, and two people sitting in silence.

I read this poem at Poetry Foundation and had this niggling sense of familiarity with the tone of voice employed – gentle, tender, with gorgeous imagery and a palpable love for the subject.

I’ve always liked poetry, and in medical school there was this one anthology of poetry, short stories and essays titled On Doctoring that introduced me to some of the poems I am most fond of and some of the poets I love – The Five Stages of Grief, The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart, The Stethoscope Song and others.

Imagine my delight when I found that the author of Monet Refuses the Operation, a poem I love, is someone I stumbled on again because I liked another of her poems. The way she describes him talking about color, light – it lingers.

Here is some biographical information about the lives of Brahms and Schumann. You can read about Lisel Mueller here and a transcript of an interview with her here.

Tagged: , , , , ,

Published:
August 7, 2011 – 08:00
Author:
By Madhu
Categories:
Comments:
1 Comment

Myth

Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx Oedipus said, “I want to ask one question. Why didn’t I recognize my mother?” “You gave the wrong answer,” said the Sphinx “But that was what made everything possible,” said Oedipus “No,” she said. “When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn’t say anything about woman.” “When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include women too. Everyone knows that.” She said, “That’s what you think.”

– Muriel Rukeyser

Postscript:

The poem says it all, yes? It’s an interesting reworking of a familiar story. You can read a bit about Muriel Rukeyser here.

Tagged: , , , ,

Published:
August 6, 2011 – 08:00
Author:
By Madhu
Categories:
Comments:
1 Comment