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This is not the place “So that's what Hell is. I'd never have believed it... Do you remember, brimstone, the stake, the gridiron? What a joke! No need of a gridiron—Hell is other people.” – Jean-Paul Sartre. This is not the place for artlessness, though Ezra echoes through the door, says 'say it over, modernly.' His new standard version stands a crime against the word: to smart it up, one must go back in time. But there’s no going back there now: no, the curse of Orpheus just hangs the air, all avenues detoured to progress, now. This is not the place for lover’s songs though this is one, a song of love declined to favour fortitude and steely eyes that lubricate themselves with those horrors only steel can face. Betrayal, blood-lust: such gods the sole allowed anachronisms. When love is least, can any righteous war obtain? Only over its dead body. This is not the place for hope or faith in dreams you are the only one to share. No, this is not the place: unwelcome mats are everywhere. Perhaps it’s right enough that times embrace the times embracing them: for misfits, what? Seems it hardly matters. Today’s engorged with its new troubadours, their world this is, and this is not the place. |
This Poem was Critiqued By: Mark Steven Scheffer On Date: 2006-02-16 16:00:20
Critiquer Rating During Critique: 10.00000
MAH,
Formally very solid. You can not escape the old IP, and shouldn't try to. Perfect vehicle for this poem. Where has great IP gone? Reading Milton at the moment - how lush, how exquisite! This here is IP with a modern voice, a proper modern voice that respects its dead. And goes to visit, like Orpheus.
I'm reading the curse of Orpheus as . . . hmmmm. The failure to resurrect the beauty? The being torn apart by hysterical, modern Maenads?
I'd have loved to have seen "cronies" worked in somewhere around "anachronisms." Particularly in your context.
These lines are plangent:
a song of love declined
to favour fortitude and steely eyes
that lubricate themselves with those horrors
only steel can face.
Shit, the whole thing is plangent. I feel like pulling out the Book of Psalms. Which means you've achieved your intent, I think.
Interesting loaded use of "obtain." You retain it's archaic sense, yet also maintain the modern. The soul of the poem captured in a word.
Of course, I noted the nice "unwelcome mats." Are a group of such mats called "matters"? Deft touch and echo of the "mats" later in the stanza.
Exquisite poem. No doubt JCH will berate me for missing something. But . . . I fall in love easy. All you have to have is beauty. Though that is rare. All the more reason to overlook the warts, or I should say to be blind to warts, since I don't see any. I almost said "freckles." But I love freckles.
MSS