I thought this poem had a resemblance to one of my earlier poems, "Spring and Meaning," (posted on 21 November 2016) but on examination it doesn't. Here's a link anyway.
He sits in strife, the literary man,
Welted with sins, with squabbles, with amours,
His desk a battle with a half-felt plan
To seize tracts of meaning with press-ganged words;
His helps to craft, his pills and good luck paws,
Jostle his laptop with its tenth-thought drafts;
Despondent in wrestle, his bowels in curds,
His taut back sears him like infected grafts.
But having mastered, his agent’s plaudits won,
Why the self-seething in a whisky glass?
His words, breathless at the market’s starting gun,
Shun knowledge that skilled scribbling’s a fake reward
Except it glow with beauty of the vase
Flower-aflame in spring, self-bodying
Being’s fact and by its otherness awed;
Piecework redeemed by art, a shouldering.
Adequacy to truth, that’s to be saved;
So Yeats was bludgeoned by his whiplash nerves,
And Conrad jack-knifed whilst his headaches raved.
And Darwin, icon-slayer though a drudge,
Spatchcocked landlub tortoise, worms in turves,
And wrenched by painings, tempted since his youth,
Laid bare with the forensics of a judge
The beauty and efficiency of truth.
All art, all men, like Dismas on the cross,
Pinioned in pain and deadweight of their faults,
Turn gasping to the emblem of their loss
Craving its standfast meaning which alone
Balms treacheries and self-hate’s bitter salts,
Those lifelong, squalid hours upon the tree:
Each poem or mind-work on which truth has blown,
Did it but know, cries, “Lord, remember me.”
====================
© April 2016
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“I’ve never been troubled with dyspepsia,” Gerald drawled untruthfully. Professor Clun looked at him sharply. “No?” he said, “I’m inclined in general to regard it as the inevitable malady of any serious or lengthy application to study.” (Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes)
He sits in strife, the literary man,
Welted with sins, with squabbles, with amours,
His desk a battle with a half-felt plan
To seize tracts of meaning with press-ganged words;
His helps to craft, his pills and good luck paws,
Jostle his laptop with its tenth-thought drafts;
Despondent in wrestle, his bowels in curds,
His taut back sears him like infected grafts.
But having mastered, his agent’s plaudits won,
Why the self-seething in a whisky glass?
His words, breathless at the market’s starting gun,
Shun knowledge that skilled scribbling’s a fake reward
Except it glow with beauty of the vase
Flower-aflame in spring, self-bodying
Being’s fact and by its otherness awed;
Piecework redeemed by art, a shouldering.
Adequacy to truth, that’s to be saved;
So Yeats was bludgeoned by his whiplash nerves,
And Conrad jack-knifed whilst his headaches raved.
And Darwin, icon-slayer though a drudge,
Spatchcocked landlub tortoise, worms in turves,
And wrenched by painings, tempted since his youth,
Laid bare with the forensics of a judge
The beauty and efficiency of truth.
All art, all men, like Dismas on the cross,
Pinioned in pain and deadweight of their faults,
Turn gasping to the emblem of their loss
Craving its standfast meaning which alone
Balms treacheries and self-hate’s bitter salts,
Those lifelong, squalid hours upon the tree:
Each poem or mind-work on which truth has blown,
Did it but know, cries, “Lord, remember me.”
====================
© April 2016
