Again upon my knees I dandle
Like an opera by Handel
These my verses, now committed,
Yet another brief quodlibet,
Pathetic saving graces, say,
In the wave-lapped Milky Way.
How to put it, what the odds?
Concede, you once-immortal gods,
Mere poetry is not enough;
The world's too full of nasty stuff.
Fear not the amputating knife—
Fond, it lets you have your life!
Updated: Jan 28, 2024
Sword in hand, Ajax grabs hold of Kassandra, who clings to the Palladion. Attic red-figured hydria, early 5th century, BCE, by the Kleophrades Painter. Museo Nazionale Archeologico, Naples, no. 2422.
The Wisdom of the Ancients
[The following series apppeared in The New English Review in October 2023; it is reproduced here with only minor changes.]
My preamble to Parts I and II of “The Burning Deck” (New English Review, September 2023) notes its model, Sir Francis Bacon’s De sapientia veterum, a book seeking to explicate thirty-one Greco-Roman myths, translated into English by Arthur Gorges in under the title The Wisdom of the Ancients (1609). “Upon deliberate consideration. my judgment is, that a concealed instruction and allegory was originally intended in many of the ancient fables,” Bacon writes—if not, he opines, they are simply absurd! I have condensed the fables into anachronic sonnets, borrowing a few words here and there from the Bacon/Gorges text (in quotes where I’ve remembered). And to make a round number of myths, I’ve added one of my own, “Bacon, or, A Legend,” no. 32. Since they had multiple authors, these fables should not “be read first as a sequence, one voice running through many personalities” (Robert Lowell, Imitations); each stands or falls on its own. Limericks by the late British poet Christopher Logue serve as epigraphs.[1]
Part III
“There was a young sailor named Bates
Who did the fandango on skates.
He fell on his cutlass
Which rendered him nutless
And practically useless on dates.
— Christopher Logue (Count Palmiro Vicarion, pseud.)
17. Cupid, or, Ontology
Lacking a progenitor, Eros, of
the gods the eldest, apart from coeval
Chaos (from whom Love conceives all things),
was born of Nyx, an egg “laid in the dark,”
and has these attributes: eternal
infancy, blind, naked, and archery.
There’s a doppelganger, too—cute Cupid,
Aphrodite’s brat, the youngest deity.
Democritus, who . . . but let’s not go there!
“And, if it were possible to conceive
its modus and process, yet it could not
be known from its cause, . . . the cause of causes,
and itself without a cause,” Bacon says.
On such scruples “exquisite sympathies depend”??
18. Diomedes, or, Blasphemy
Diomedes stuck Aphrodite in the arm
the only combatant at Troy to wound
a god. Pallas Athena ordered it,
if Aphrodite were to fight, and his name
foretold this. Then as guest in Apulia
of King Daunus, he bringing on bad luck
caused by this impiety, the king slew him,
his men all turning swans, which chanted dirges
about their sad mischance. Well, blasphemy
was the felony at issue—the man
had pilfered the Palladion, Athena’s
gift, from Troy. But he’d already returned
the damned thing to Trojan Aeneas in Rome,
and swans’ lamentations I call over the top.
19. Dædalus, or, Hubris
Snugging the queen of Crete in a fake cow
to try the yard-long prick of Poseidon
’s bull, thus engendering the Minotaur,
half-Bos, half-Sapiens, Dædalus then built
the Labyrinth of Knossos for it
to inhabit and devour young girls and boys.
Crafts like his thrive among us today:
the spies’ “business of exquisite poisons,”
the traders in guns, and military
shit is everywhere condemned and shelters.
“This stuff will always be prohibited
but yet be accepted in our city,”
Tacitus despaired an aeon ago in Rome.
20. Erichthonius, or, Pretensions
Hephaestos seeking to screw Athena,
and she being unwilling, his semen
fell on Earth. The product of this union
was Erichthonius who, though fine-bodied
from the middle up, had legs like an eel.
In attempting gracefully to conceal
this defect, he invented the four-wheeled
chariot, which overran his mother.
When art violates nature, it seldom
attains the end sought, but rather specious
works that are arrogantly adopted,
shown off, and rejoiced in by their dupes—
witness most mechanical inventions,
although dreamt up with charitable intentions.
21. Deucalion, or, A Category Error
The population of the world wiped out,
the Bronze Age over, an oracle advised
Deucalion (that’s Noah) and his wife Pyrrha,
Afterthought’s child, to toss their mother’s bones
behind them—but the Flood having leveled
everything, her sarcophagus was lost.
Weeping, they flung rocks over their shoulders.
and new happy apes sprang up from these.
A phoenix cannot be reborn from ash
and parental units’ resurrection;
the error’s category—they’re trash!
Once having had a sentient connection,
“dem bones” could not then restore another
(provided Earth was actually their mother).
22. Nemesis, or, Fortuna
Nemesis, a goddess at Rhamnous—I’ve
been there!—where the shape-shifting Zeus screwed her,
was the daughter of Nyx and Poseidon.
Tartarus got a child by her in Hell.
Supplied with wings and adorned with a crown,
she bears a javelin in her right hand,
a mirror in her left, and rides a stag.
Her nickname was Implacable.
I’d say she was Fortuna, the empress
of the world, chastiser of aughtiness,
but though gram-positive and detected
in old Erratasthenes’ colander,
such old algorithms aren’t respected—
not being bingeworthy, like performing fleas.
23. Achelous, or, Cornucopias
“In the long run we are all dead.”—J. M. Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923)
The tale’s well-known: the River Achelous
becomes a bull to combat heroic
Hercules for the hand of Princess
Deianeira, daughter of Oeneus, god
of wine. Hercules snaps off a horn,
wins Achelous’s cornucopia and the girl.
Flash forward, then, to her handing Nessus’s
poisoned shirt to him; he puts it on.
Denver, Phoenix, and LA, all three
contracted with the Colorado river
for water. They got their cornucopias
but must pay the price. For Hercules dies
in agony, and his unwitting bride—
whose name means “man destroyer”—hangs herself.
24. Dionysus, or, Shiva
Semele bound Zeus by oath to grant
her an unknown request; lightning killed her
in its performance, but an infant shut
up in Zeus’s thigh was born. Called Dionysos—
in Rome, Bacchus—and nursed by Persephone,
queen of the underworld, the child grew up
to be the god of wine-making, insanity,
and acting. In India, he’s Shiva!
Lusts in the unconscious to perdition
play until the dikes of shame and fear
give way and we punch in the rampant bad.
“Zounds! I was never so bethump’d with words,
Since I first call’d my brother’s father Dad. . . .
Mad world! Mad gods! Crazy composition!”[2]
Part IV
There was a young fellow named Sweeney,
Whose girl was a terrible meanie.
The hatch of her snatch
Had a catch that would latch--
She could only be screwed by Houdini.
—Christopher Logue (pseud., Count Palmiro Vicarion)
25. Atalanta and Hippomenes, or, Holy Deadlock
Atalanta, a virgin Boeotian
huntress, embraced only those able
to beat her in a footrace—defeated,
you lose your head, but Hippomenes wins,
Aphrodite gives him three free bonus shots
(moral equivalent of Puccini’s
trinity of riddles in Turandot)
and it’s holy deadlock for the poor so-and-so,
a contest with nature in which “certain
golden apples” beat art, Bacon explains.
Three guesses as to how such challenges
work out, both now and in antique remains.
Don’t forget that failing earns you the chop.
In love the thing to know, of course, is never stop.
26. Prometheus, or, Man’s Fate
What a piece of work is Prometheus—“how
cunningly foresighted, qualified
in apprehension, and in action all-
indulgent,”[3] downloading fire from heaven
for human benefit—and, moreover,
perpetual youth, the title to which
a serpent stole, eternal renewal’s
recipe thus falling to the race of snakes.
Prometheus is “clearly and expressly”
Providence, Bacon says, lodged in “the frail
vessel of flesh to redeem mankind. So
we indulge ourselves no such liberties
as those, for fear of using strange fire.” Ah,
dust’s quintessence, O paragon of beasts!
27. Icarus and Scylla and Charybdis, or, Compromise
All hail mediocrity, the middle way!
And compromise extolled in politics
and morality (but not in science,
which mandates that we be fanatics).
Icarus failed at it, but by sailing
between the rock Scylla and Charybdis
Odysseus escaped the ambiguous “bane
and shipwreck of fine geniuses and arts.”
“A dry soul is best,” Heraclitus says.
Defect’s a reptile; excess, a bird,
the former grounded, the latter upward-
borne, the first clammy, the second heaven-
bent. In practicing to be an eagle
Icarus soared toward the sun. He died.
28. Sphinx, or, The Last Sphincter
Sphinx is called a monster by some. Not so,
and neither is she “Science,” as Bacon
so wordily contends, grinding his axe.
“Our words ‘Sphinx’ and ‘sphincter’ go together
back to old Greek sfingo (σφῐ́γγω), which means . . .
‘bind fast or tight.’” There are over sixty
sphincters in your body. Different sorts,
they function “to make sure that stuff . . . travels
to where it should, and in good time.” The Sphinx—
or “Strangler,” as the blunt ancients dubbed her—
is the final sphincter, guarding the gap
before the supposèd sea, the route
of the “bare seed” to which Saint Paul refers.[4]
29. Persephone, or, A Return Ticket
The Romans call Persephone Proserpine.
In Sicily, picking narcissi, she
was importuned by Hades, who bore her
off to Tartarus, where, plumb out of luck,
she became Hell’s bride, First Lady of Dis.
Half a year gone, she habitually spends
the other half with mother. Visitors
need a special aller-retour—a bit
of something like golden mistletoe—see
Frazer’s magnum opus, The Golden Bough
(London: Macmillan, 1890; repr.,
1980), 13 vols., passim. . . . Pluck
it and a fresh piece shoots up in its stead,
service included down among the dead.
30. Mētis, or, Time Spews
Although she shape-shifted to evade him
Zeus had his way with Mētis, impregnating
her. Gaia prophesied the son she bore
would rule heaven, so he swallowed her.
Prometheus (or perhaps Hephaestos)
wacked him with an axe just when her waters
broke, and Athena leapt, fully armored,
from his forehead (near the River Triton).
Later—or maybe before this happened—
Mētis taught Zeus how best to extricate his
brethren from Kronos’s paternal belly:
a drop of antimony made Time spew.
Sapiens supposes that everything that’s cool
emerges from their addled brains, the fool!
31. The Sirens, or, A Racket
Daughters of Achelous, unlucky river,
and Terpsichore (the muse), they lost their wings
contending with their mother’s family,
who snatched their feathers to make themselves crowns.
The Sirens settled on nearby islands,
where they tempted sailors with their racket,
then for fun, apparently, murdered them,
whitening the shore with the seamen’s bones,
a blatant warning! But the misfortune
of others does not deter poor human
beings from pleasure. The fittest recourse
is that of Orpheus, who with his singing
drowned out the wicked Sirens’ saucy noise.
Prima la musica, dopo le parole![5]
Let’s have the music first, and then the tale.
32. Bacon, or, A Legend
Birthed by Elizabeth, the Faerie Queen
Gloriana, or Belphoebe, he was younger
brother to the duke of Earl beheaded
for rebelling against their Virgin Mom.
A native of Utopia (near St. Albans
on the Thameslink line), he invented
science and wrote plays and poems, using
other names, among them “Shake-Speare,” Spenser,
Marlowe, Greene, and Jonson. Battling a Byrd
at Highgate in the Little Ice Age, he untwigged.
Bacon’s “lively hazel eye” is compared
to that of a viper. He sometimes hired
free-lance quills to feather his projections
—handy rascals. Perhaps “that Stratford man”?
“The world's a bubble,” his lordship lamented.
“Man’s life’s less than a span. He writes in dust.”
Notes
[1] Christopher Logue, Count Palmiro Vicarion’s Book of Limericks (Paris: Olympia Press, 1956), nos. 43, 163.
[2] Philip the Bastard in Shakespeare’s King John 2.1.778-79, 875; last line modified here to suit .
[3] So says Apollodorus, I think. It doesn’t seem to be Bacon—too poetic!
[4] “And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be but a bare seed [γυμνὸν κόκκον].”—1 Cor. 15:37. Quotations in this poem are from Peter Dreyer, “Sphinxology,” New English Review, November 2022. Bacon’s chapter XXVIII is titled “Sphinx, or Science.”
[5] Prima la musica e poi le parole, “First the music, then the words,” is the title of a one-act opera by Antonio Salieri, libretto by Giovanni Battistta Casti, quoted in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier.
Updated: Feb 7, 2024
Rhea offers Kronos the Omphalos stone wrapped in a cloth as a substitute for the newborn Zeus. Attic red figure terracotta pelikē (jar), 460–450 BCE, attributed to the Nausicaä Painter. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
[The following sequence apppeared in The New English Review in September 2023; it is reproduced here with only minor changes.]
The boy stood on the burning deck,
his back was to the mast.
He would not move an inch, he said,
till Oscar Wilde had passed.
But Oscar Wilde, that wily bird,
he rolled the boy a plum,
and as he stooped to pick it up
[ta-tum, ta-tum, ta-tum . . .]
—Anon., after Felicia, Mrs Hemans
Inscribed by an unknown hand on the wall of a public convenience in a Shaftesbury Avenue pub, where I found them many years ago, these lines are surely the best parody of Hemans’s much-parodied poem “Casabianca” (1826). Moreover, they offer striking metaphors: the deck = the world; the boy = us; “Oscar Wilde” = civilization/culture; the plum = art, music, poetry . . .
Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) anachronistically presents an important perception for us in her poem. The “deck,” everywhere only too obviously bursting into flames today, was already smoldering in the early nineteenth century. It had in fact been smoldering even in antiquity. The Anthropocene was well under way when the forests of Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant were hacked down to build warships in which men sailed to far-off places like Troy in order to murder, rape, and enslave their fellow human beings. The Corinthians developed the trireme—someone called it “the guided missile of the day”—as early as the seventh century BCE, Thucydides (1.12.4–13.2) shows. Even bigger ships—quadriremes and quinqueremes—came into use in the Hellenistic era. The Romans copied them, using a shipwrecked Carthaginian polyreme as a model.
Although regarded throughout the long history of Hemans’ poem as an epitome of British courage, the boy on the burning deck was actually the son of the captain of the French republican warship L’Orient, blown up in the 1798 Battle of the Nile by Horatio Nelson’s British Royal Navy. It took thousands of trees to make a ship like that—around 6,000 were used to build Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory. England’s oak forests were already exhausted, and timber to build warships had by then to be obtained from the Baltic and North America. Decks were burning all over the place.
The Wisdom of the Ancients
Sometime around 1600, Francis Bacon, a young lawyer struggling for political patronage in the dog-eat- dog world of aristocraticTudor society, wrote a work he titled De sapientia veterum, explicating thirty-one Greco-Roman fables. Translated into English by Arthur Gorges, this was published in 1609 under the title The Wisdom of the Ancients.
“Upon deliberate consideration. my judgment is, that a concealed instruction and allegory was originally intended in many of the ancient fables,” Bacon writes—because if not, he thinks, they are simply absurd! Composed by unknown bards millennia ago to lampoon the injustices and absurdities of a world in which war and slavery were constant realities, thus enabling their listeners better to endure horrors they could not avoid, the fables are poetry, however, and Bacon admits: “I profess not to be a poet.” His contemporary Dr. William Harvey (he who discovered that blood circulates) agreed. Bacon, he said, “writes philosophy like a Lord Chancellor.” The opposite of a poet, Yeats supposed, is an opinionated man, and Solicitor General, Attorney General, and, finally, Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, was one of the most opinionated men in British history. He was thus not the right man for the present job, and his demystifying of the fables I find humdrum.
The myths themselves come down to us in multiply contradictory versions. I have condensed them into anachronizing blank verse sonnets, stealing only a few words here and there from the Bacon/Gorges text. Whether I have done any better in seeking hidden meaning in them than Bacon is not for me to say, “but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?” (Robert Browning, “Andrea del Sarto”). To make a round number of myths, I’ve added one of my own, “Bacon, or, A Legend,” no. 32.
“Cassandra, or, Prediction” is the first fable in Bacon’s sequence—presumably because it was Cicero’s epigram on Cato the Younger, which he quotes in it, that prompted him to write De sapientia veterum in the first place. That position is counterintuitive, however, and I have put my version, “Cato and Cassandra, or, Talking Heads,” in twelfth place (in part 2) instead. “Ouranos [Bacon has the Latin “Cœlum,” but I prefer the Greek], or, Beginnings” more logically comes first.
As epigraphs to parts 2, 3, and 4, I employ limericks by the British poet Christopher Logue, CBE (1926–2011), which, like the Shaftesbury Avenue parody of Hemans’s “Casabianca,” seem to me latter-day equivalents of the hellzapoppin fantasies of the original Indo-European poets.[1] Logue’s unfinished epic War Music, composed for a BBC Radio program, modernizes parts of Homer’s Iliad, and although our approaches are quite different, his foreshadows my own to some extent: “Achilles speaks as if I found you on a vase. / So leave his stone-age values to the sky,” Logue’s Agamemnon admonishes the Greek warriors on the beach at Troy, where they have been summoned for a pep talk by “Ajax / Grim underneath his tan as Rommel after ‘Alamein.”[2]
Part I
1. Ouranos, or, Beginnings
A dome of brass—Sky, Heaven, Ouranos,
the partner of Gaia, Earth, goddess of grass,
having done duty in their nuptial bed,
got from her a breed of sons, the Titans.
Earth being then—still is!—a world-class MILF,
their youngest whelp, Time—yes, little Kronos!
—gelding Heaven with the sickle of stars
from Leo’s mane, diddled her himself instead,
swallowing the unwanted progeny.
The adamantine instrument mislaid
in the cosmic mulch pile or potting shed,
when Zeus was born your Auntie Rhea saved him,
fooling Time with a neatly diapered rock.
Forever over, such was the strange start of things!
2. Pan, or, Nature
A shaggy, goat-footed flautist with horns
that reached up to heaven, human above,
half-beast below, Hubris was his mother
and the Destinies his sisters. Beaten
by Cupid at wrestling, he met his end,
a scholiast reports, in the reign
of Tiberius, when a voice from the shore
frighted passing shipfolk by saying so.
His wife was Echo, and their only child,
Iambē, or Banter, famous teller of tales,
was the paramour of Pentameter,
duke of Ellington, who promulgated
the top rule for poets on Parnassus:
“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!”
3. Typhonia, or, A Rebel
Zeus birthed Pallas Athena from his brain,
and Mom, captivated by her armored
mien, seeking similarly to concoct
offspring without a tarse’s intervention,
got pregnant with the help of mudlark Gaia,
a python’s egg, and Time’s chronic semen,
bunning the oven with me, Typhonia,
a rebel girl, I’m born to game the game.
Ripping the cables from Zeus’s hands and feet,
I stashed them in my Hermès Welkin bag
(the rule of the Cognoscenti’s so neat!)
but that nasty wing-foot boy stole them back
and meanie Zeus dumped Mount Ætna on my head.
I’m down there yet—still cool, but good as dead!
4. The Cyclops, or, Ministers of Terror
Deafened by that hammering, blinded by
their conflagrations’ smoke, Zeus first consigned
the wheel-eyed wall builders to Tartarus,
or Hell. Then musing that they might as well
be put to understrap Health Care’s pious
work or contrive new thunderbolt matériel,
he had them slay for quackery some quack.
Even mousy Apollo had a crack!
You may suppose them miscreant ministers,
bad in their nature, whetted by disgrace
and diligence done in official spite
at “private nods” and orders of the boss.
Condemned at last to confront retaliation’s
light, they meet their sussed deserts one nighty night.
5. Narcissus, or, Self-Love
This stuck-up parvenu, contemptuous
of his fellows, comes with an adjective,
“narcissistic.” And with groupies—Echo
being the most faithful. Glimpsing himself
in a mirror, he fell madly in love,
so wild about his emergent icon
that just being there was a sensation
consecrated to self-admiration.
Loose cannon on any deck, Narcissus
rejects the huddled masses’ right to roam
to the beamish banks of “Here.” He’s Tory!
That was to be expected, no?
Will the Supremish Court of Erewhon
(“Home of the Okay”) still deny certiorari?)
6. The River Styx, or, Promises, Promises
The gods witness their oaths by the River Styx,
which meanders round the demon court of Dis.
For this form alone, none other but this,
is regarded as obligatory
and inviolable—cheaters are booted
from the pantheon of Olympus—
those risk the joys of Helicon’s table
who don’t swear as honestly as able.
Necessity, whose stand-in is the Styx,
a lethal stream that cannot be crossed back,
is bell, book, and candle to the mighty,
so moguls’ pledges are best ratified
by Stygian oaths engaged in on its banks,
whose breeching even bullshit artists can’t abide.
7. Perseus, or, War
Perseus was commanded by Athena
to behead the Gorgon Medusa, who
petrified the West, turning to stone all
who gazed on her. Her half-sisters the Greæ
sold her out, lending him their single tooth
and eye. Thus armed, he aimed at her image
in a mirror, severed her neck, and got
sharp-winged Pegasus from the gushing blood.
A hatchet man must demand from treason
an eye for information, and a tooth
to rumor, bite, and nibble at the truth.
Pegasus is fame, perish the reason!
Medusa’s head is history’s sigil,
the colophon to the stuff the victors scribble.
8. Endymion, or, Those Special Someones
“Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of humankind pass by.”
—Oliver Goldsmith
Enamored of the shepherd Endymion,
the goddess Luna got it on with him
secretly (as always wise!), descending
to nigh[3] her nitwit sweetie in his sleep,
in a cozy condominium—complete
with swimming pool—in Erewhon. Post-coitum,
and his woolly quadrupeds multiplying,
the herding crowd were all green with envy!
The stellar few are fond of hoi polloi,
who greatly enjoy them in REM slumber.
A yokel’s fondest dream’s to be the buoy
of some superstar who’s got his number,
glad to be had—if not, in fact, eager.
Your land is their land, according to Pete Seeger.
Part II
Memnon leaves for the Trojan War. Black-figure vase, 550-525 BCE. Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels.
An avant-garde bard named McNamiter
Had a tool of enormous diameter;
But it wasn’t the size bought tears to her eyes.
’Twas the rhythm--dactylic hexameter![4]
—Christopher Logue (Count Palmiro Vicarion, pseud.)
9. The Giants’ Little Sister, or, Fame
The Giants, seeded in Gaia by the garum
spilled when Kronos gelded his father Sky
(whose groans outraged the ocean, lust springing
from the foam), assailed the immortal gods
with red-hot trash bins and flaming barbells,
but were repelled with thunderbolts and slain.
To commemorate the death of these bums,
Earth fêted their fetid little sister, Fame.
Fame’s offspring, an insolvent lot, increase,
rebellious, wanting change, now only checked
by flashing lights and noise, their sole recourse
inventing seditious lies and slanders,
branded “fake news,” to libel, cheat, and rob
those called upon to civilize their mob.
10. Actaeon and Pentheus, or, Voyeurs
Actaeon, it’s said, saw Diana bare,
and she made a stag of him, whereupon
his own gang of hounds ripped him to bites.
Pentheus peeped at Bacchus’s sacred rites
from a treetop, whence the maddened women
dragged him down. Thinking him an animal,
they tore him bodily apart. His head
impaled, his mother paraded it home.
Did Actaeon profane Diana by chance?
Not true, they’d gone hunting together, pals—
he’d just hoped to know her better! Pentheus?
The tale’s been bowdlerized .The facts are wrong.
He’d importuned a degendered party,
it seems, and “they” ripped off the poor chap’s . . .
11. Orpheus, or, Enlightenment
Delightful music calms the brutish breast,
it soften rocks and unbends the knotted
oak (not what Congreve mandates, you find
—but close). Orpheus pursues his bride to Hell
and wins her back with singing, but then quits,
loses her again, and sorry raves
to trees and rocks, annoying humankind,
who want him deconstructed, chopped to bits.
But what if Bacchus and those stonèd scolders
were the lusts and appetites, Orpheus.
Philosophy, his Eurydice maybe
its Stuff? Turned off by such detumescent
metaphors, the mob of maddened maenads,
like politicians and sausage makers, chose scraps.
12. Cato and Cassandra, or Talking Heads
Foretelling the Roman Republic’s
ruin, Cato Minor tempted cruel Fate
“as though he lived in Plato’s Republic
and not Romulus’s shit.”[5] Cassandra, too,
addressed the future. Some say serpents’ tongues
licked a sense of Troy’s fall into her ears.
Others, that it was a bribe, Apollo’s
randy tit for tat, on which he reneged
when she shrank from “doing” a god: predict
though she might, she’d no longer be believed!
Locrian Ajax had her when Troy collapsed,
his snickersnee whipping Apollo’s lyre—
for a bare bodkin may its quietus make
more ways than one—and doomscrolling’s no fun!
13. Proteus, or, Matter
Poseidon’s herdsman, Proteus knows secrets
of all kinds, but to learn them you must bind
him. Fettered, and seeking to free himself,
he shapeshifts to innumerable
forms and happenings. (Another Proteus
was a king in Egypt, and Helen’s host
when Paris took her phantom twin to Troy,
Hesiod says, but that’s different “matter.”)
Poseidon’s weapon’s the trident, symbol
of the big shebang—for he’s none other
than that sweetheart Satan, cast out by God
into the daily world that light reveals.
At noon, old Proteus counts his sea-calf herd;
then sleeps. So, then . . . Shut up and calculate!
14. Memnon, or, Presumption
Memnon, king of Ethiopia, Tithonus
and Aurora’s son, came from Africa
to aid Troy, his father’s city. Thirsting
for glory—only the best good enough
for him!— he fought Achilles one-on-one,
and thus, need it be said, died. Zeus sent birds
to grace his obsequies, and morning’s light
from his statue evoked a mournful hum.
Pausanias, who heard it, attests the noise
but in his day the statue was broken
in half—the myth says by the King of Kings,
Thingamajig. This sorry story tells
us little, beyond the usual end
of glory, for fame’s a pathetic gig.
15. Tithonus, or, Too Much!
The immortal gods despised old age, but
Tennyson gives to Tithonus these lines:
"The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan."
As plagiarist, I simply plead fair use—
for who could hope ever to write better!
Tithonus, seeking immortality,
forgets he will grow old, while his bride, Dawn,
remains forever young. “And all I was,
in ashes. Can thy love, / . . . make amends . . . ?” Yes!
Dawn does not reject him, Propertius says.[6]
Well, dear reader, how does that sound? Okay?
16. Hera’s Suitor, or, Honesty
Zeus as lover took many different
forms—in turn, a bull, eagle, swan, and a
shower of gold, but when he sought to get
it on with Hera, his predestined spouse,
transmogrified into a wet, weather-
beaten, affrighted, trembling, starveling
cuckoo bird: “a wise fable,” from, it’s said,
the “entrails of morality”—its guts.
The moral is that in love one should
avoid conceited shows, which, to succeed,
require like impressionability
in the courted, who, if of good account,
is not to be won by boastful displays,
but by conceding one’s most abject self.
Notes
[1] Christopher Logue, Count Palmiro Vicarion’s Book of Limericks (Paris: Olympia Press, 1956), nos. 43, 163, 181.
[2] Christopher Logue, War Music: An Account of Books 1–4 and 16–19 of Homer’s “Iliad” (1981; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, 24, 11. Logue died before he could finishWar Music, his working title.
[3] I would note that while naai (stich, or sew) is slang for “fuck” in Afrikaans, the homophonic verb “nigh” here is intended simply to convey the poetic sense of “to approach, or come near to.”
[4] Of dactylic hexameter it may be said that it works well in Ancient Greek, Latin, Hungarian, and Lithuanian, but not in English. Still, some have tried it, notably Arthur Hugh Clough in his 1848 tour de force The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich, from part 1 of which the following is a sample:
“Bid me not, grammar defying, repeat from grammar-defiers
Long constructions strange and plusquam-thucydidëan,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Crossing from this to that, with one leg here, one yonder,
So, less skilful, but equally bold, and wild as the torrent,
All through sentences six at a time, unsuspecting of syntax,”
which somewhat explains the lachrymosity of McNamiter’s SO!
[5] “ . . . loquitur enim tanquam Republica Platonis, non tanquam in fæce Romuli,” Cicero writes in a letter to a friend of the Stoic Marcus Porcius Cato (95–46 BCE), called Cato the Younger (Cato Minor in Latin).
[6] See Sextus Propertius, Elegies 2.18A: 5–22: “Aurora didn’t allow him to lie there lonely in the House of Dawn. . . . Climbing into her chariot she spoke of the gods’ injustice”