Seeming and Savour

Ruta graveolens, rue, herb-of-grace . . .

“A poet can be intelligent . . . yet he walks, half-balmy and over-armored . . . by his amnesia, ignorance  and education.”—Robert Lowell, "Afterthought" in Notebook (3d ed., 1970)

1.      Amnesia

Thank God we forget

2.      Ignorance

And know so little

3.      Education

Though we learned so much.

Lost memories, threatened time,

Rue averts the evil eye

Displacing all along the line,

Savour and seeming, summer's lie,

En route to amnesia's bland sea

And drifts of immemorial snow

Banked up fled centuries ago.

Is this, though, where I wish to be?

Passing through like all of you,

I picked some sonnets for my shield,

Escutcheon of the dearest dead,

Whom best to trust, ancestral true.

When those parting words were said,

Rue, though bitter, they annealed.

Envoi

For you there's rosemary and rue; these keep

Seeming and savour all the winter long.

—Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, act 4, scene 4

La gnôle

John Trumbull, The Death of Paulus Aemilius at the Battle of Cannae (1773)

Hope that springs eternal in no

The human breast is fond of gin,

Or Scotch or beer or anything

Designed to help a hope to spring.

—Samuel Hoffenstein, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing (1928)

"Nux vomica, the "vomiting nut,"

Semen of the strychnine tree,

As homeopathic remedy,

Treats the postelectoral urge to spew.

But strychnine's a deadly poison, too!"

"The juniper's the tree of hope.

With its berries the Swiss flavored gin

At Geneva—whose name means 'Mouth'—

Where Hannibal, headed south,

Discovered it, crossing the Alps in 218 BCE,

And spilled it to crack boulders in his way.

It might've fueled the Carthaginian army at Cannae!"*

"Others insist, as I recall, it was the Dutch invented gin:

Piet Hein zijn naam is klein,

Zijn daden bennen groot.†

For them, jenever—the juniper's boozy liquid fruit—

Gushed up like . . . like . . . like spring water in the brain.

(This looked-for rhyme may be pathetic, but's no sin.)"

"OK'd by (or, at least, oblivious) the FDA,

Gin makes no difference to our human slaughter,

And yet it drives cruel care away.

La gnôle of Hannibal's Gauls at Cannae,

New Rome's defenders' also love—with tonic and a slice of lime—today."

* The battle of Cannae in 216 BCE, perhaps the worst defeat in Roman history, made Hannibal's reputation as one of the world's greatest generals. According to Polybius, 70,000 Roman soldiers were killed, among them the Roman commander, consul Lucius Aemilius Paullus. Hannibal's infantry consisted mostly of Gauls recruited on his passage up the Rhône valley.

The Romans fought on, however, and in 146 BCE, they sacked the city of Carthage and slaughtered its population. Today, a few thousand years later, however, Carthaginians—North Africans—once again besiege Europe. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose: The more things change, the more they are the same.

Gnôle = eau de vie, moonshine, white lightning.

†"Piet Hein, his name is little but his deeds are great." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Pieterszoon_Hein

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/de-zilvervloot-silver-fleet.html

Biomimicry

“Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.”—stock exhange proverb

Who first tamed a pig—no doubt, a litter

Of piglets orphaned in some bosky dell—

Made a metaphor for greed’s devotees as well.

Hogs serve, too, as patterns for the jerks

Who rough-hew lives and call it “public works”

And plutocrats who have them at their beck and call.

“If birds didn’t exist, would planes?”*

If pigs didn’t exist, would politicians?

We see in Nature’s drafts the late perfected skills

That serve to chain the planet to their wills.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course,

though seldom leaders on the bourse.

The weasel's not a model for the billionaire.

The simile’s unfair—mustelids make honest kills.

Envoi

“ . . . there is boundless theft In limited professions.”—Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, act 4, scene 3

*Reddit post.