Returning to my poetic roots is not so difficult as in general I know what I like and fame holds dim interest. Dim interest too in toil and Auden here has a quite reveling poem unread until today as I waited for the MRI of the post-surgical brain of my wife. Probably I was stimulated by re-reading Germanic poetry and went by instinct to the late Victorians and later Edwardians and still later roaring 20’s and decadent 30’s and on and on to this post-Covid NOW where I mainly spend my time browsing around for what illumines me, and the last week or so for poetry. Of course Wanted a book and grabbed an old collection of Auden’s poems from my Mission days haunting the cheap carts in front of the bookstore always inspired by my friend from Bolerium Books whom I knew from my work with CISPES running their SF fundraising phone bank on saving people from torture ASAP. He found a first edition Kant in the cheap cart in the West Village of NYC worth about $10,000. I joked with him about the cover art being a tell right off. My Selected Poems of Auden of course is my $.50 second edition Vintage press paperback published in 1970. As I am creating a safe easy to move in space in a cluttered and lived in studio much of my paperback library is being considered as a boxed elephant and 38 books are on Pango now. Am I to put 1500 more up just to keep them handy when bookstores close and massive censorship kicks in? Some will sell, most not and space eaten up with stagnant Chi. Not a bad problem to have in this astonishingly asinine aeon all things considered, not needing to report to a job and still eating and renting and having a limited community ain’t bad.
However what is bad is very very very bad as if on a “darkling plane where ignorant armies fight at night” over the Shield of Achilles. https://poets.org/poem/iliad-book-xviii-shield-achilles
Auden-
The Shield of Achilles
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
All contributions welcome as I await further instructions from the Muses.