Dante Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was among my favorite poets when I was a teenager, and I still retain warm feelings for him. He was also a wonderful painter, founder of the pre-raphaelite school which also begat William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and a close friend of the poet Swinburne (another of my early favorites). I've read that when he and Swinburne went out on the town, their final destinations were impossible to predict. Rossetti made it a habit to write Swinburne's name and address on a piece of paper, and affix it to his lapel, so that when they were separated during the wild night that followed—and Swinburne became incapacitated, as he invariably did—some kind passerby might see him home.

Rossetti is also known for his tragic love affair with his model, and wife, Elizabeth Siddall (pictured at right, in Rossetti's Beata Beatrix). Despondent over the stillborn birth of their daughter several years before, and hopelessly addicted to laudanum, she died by her own hand, at the age of 32. Grief-stricken, Rossetti buried his poems with her, sheathed within her flowing red hair. Seven years later, he ordered her exhumed, in the dead of night, so that he could retrieve them. It was reported that she remained beautiful in death, and that her hair had continued growing, filling the casket around her vibrantly, shrouding her in luscious red. He published the poems the following year, but was oppressed by his guilt for their retrieval for the remainder of his life. His book was savaged by critics for the rather frank eroticism of his poems—like Swinburne, he was considered a "dirty" poet. For the next dozen years, until he died at age 51, he alternated between fits of depression and mental problems even more severe, exacerbated by drug and alcohol addiction.

He published his second and final volume of poetry in 1881, the year preceding his death, and in it he finished his House of Life sonnet sequence, from which the following poem, A Superscription, originates. It is probably his most famous poem, and provides what can only be described as the ending punctuation for a life that, in spite of its achievements, would best be decribed by the man who lived it as being misspent.

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell;
Unto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell
Cast up thy Life's foam-fretted feet between;
Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen
Which had Life's form and Love's, but by my spell
Is now a shaken shadow intolerable,
Of ultimate things unuttered the frail screen.

Mark me, how still I am I But should there dart
One moment through thy soul the soft surprise
Of that winged Peace which lulls the breath of sighs,
Then shalt thou see me smile, and turn apart
Thy visage to mine ambush at thy heart
Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes.

Ernest Dowson

Arthur Symons described Ernest Dowson as resembling a "demoralized Keats", a representation which has always occurred to me as being apt. The similarities are several, and obvious—a fixation upon beauty so pure (in its way) that it verged on naive, an effortless-seeming musical facility, deep strains of both passion and melancholy infusing their work—and, of course, tuberculosis. Just as it ravaged Keats and his family, it obliterated Dowson's, who lost both parents to the disease just a few years before his own tubercular death, at the ripe old age of 32.

Of course, there were as many ways in which they were extremely different; Keats was by all accounts a far better adjusted person than was Dowson (but really, who wasn't?), and was also far more driven. Similarly, Keats was not a drunk or a drug-addict (nor was he a prospective pedophile), and though he certainly confronted despair on a regular basis, he did not succomb to it, as Dowson so often did (and with such apparent relish).


Dowson was, of course, a member of the Rhymer's Club, a storied group that included Symons and Yeats among its members; it is likely, in fact, that he would've been counted as its most promising member, in 1892 or 3, a state of affairs which obviously did not reflect reality. Symons would write his book about symbolism which had a profound influence on the poetry of the next century, Yeats would, of course, become Yeats.

And Ernest Dowson fell in love with an eleven year-old girl, made a goddamn fool of himself, become an even bigger goddamn souse, began reveling in the idea of living in the shadow of his former promise, all the while creating verses in his little notebook of varying quality, from the trite and the self-indulgent to the sublime. It is both legend and fact that nearly all of his poems were written to the girl, who was the daughter of his landlord, and a barmaid in their tavern. According to Symons' account, when the girl became 17, Dowson courted her, with the permission of her parents. There was a day when, at her mother's behest, she sat in a chair and distractedly listened as he read his tortured, love-stricken verses aloud to her—I have been faithful to thee, Cynarae, in my fashion—and promptly eloped with the waiter who lived upstairs.

This is among my favorite of his poems, written obviously about her, with a little more self-awareness that he is typically noted for. It is called Flos Lunae (the last verse is probably my favorite of anything he wrote—it is so honest, and so brutal, it nearly breaks my heart):

I WOULD not alter thy cold eyes,
Nor trouble the calm fount of speech
With aught of passion or surprise.
The heart of thee I cannot reach:
I would not alter thy cold eyes.

I would not alter thy cold eyes;
Nor have thee smile, nor make thee weep:
Though all my life droops down and dies,
Desiring thee, desiring sleep,
I would not alter thy cold eyes.

I would not alter thy cold eyes;
I would not change thee if I might,
To whom my prayers for incense rise,
Daughter of dreams! my moon of night!
I would not alter thy cold eyes.

I would not alter thy cold eyes,
With trouble of the human heart:
Within their glance my spirit lies,
A frozen thing, alone, apart;
I would not alter thy cold eyes.

Ain't made for the cold

It's a bitter-cold night in the northern tundra, and I'm feeling lonesome for home. The tumblers in my head are spinning, wild and inexplicable in their dark, and my thoughts are jumbled, thickly, noisomely, like they are struggling against their container, driven to distraction by the little light showing through.

Yeah.

This is a poem about Texas I wrote, couple years ago:


On a Tuesday Evening, in August

In the pasture tonight, Papa's burnt-out stone
house shone under the whole moon
like a ruined, shrunken Rome.

Past the peach orchard, on the way
to the pond, the grasses moaned long
and low, lilting strains of threnody

deepened by sunflowers, large
as dinner plates, beating heavy
shadows along my feet.

I know how long the plow has rusted
beside the withering dogwood tree.

The sun unlooses chaos on temporary things.

Come see how young the Earth is
beneath its mouldering wounds.

I saw the sky black with locusts
summers ago when the sun wasted
the tomatoes and shrivelled the pond

small and tame as a wash-tub.
The dried mud was split and peeling
and the grass shivery and mean

when the sluicing cloud passed over
and a great white owl began to scream
on the high bank of the western rim

like a forgotten child, bawling across
the leavings of a Caesar or a Khan.

The sun begets confusion on temporary things.

Come see how sure the earth is
beneath its piddling wounds

The cicada sings past dark sometimes
during a full moon, and in August
they'll sing straight through the night

and the fictions of 3am are ended
by the undulations and urgency
of noon. Tonight the apple cactus

will bloom its chaste flower and even
the rattlesnakes will sleep and dream
of fat bullfrogs, and the scorpions

will dream of locusts, of soft bodies
that shudder under their tender venoms.

The sun designs its vision on temporary things.

Behold, how golden the earth is
beneath its glittering wounds.

Hegel-Shmaygel

While Auden's ditty was undeniably spot-on—

No one could ever inveigle
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
To offer an apology
For his Phenomenology.

—he can be forgiven, finally, don't you think?

The flat-headed one, who "ruined the minds of a whole generation", has, after all, been ascended to pure being for 179 years, today.

Decreation

When Teri died it was as if i was creation. As if all of matter was contained in me.

While the words echoed in my head, and my brain attempted to create a thought in English to acknowledge what i heard, i felt the expanding universe stop. Felt the white-hot sensation of a billion billion stars, the airless gloom of deepest space—and i felt everything subvert, decreate, devour itself, contracting finally to the head of a pin—and then, gone. Fifteen billion years, reduced in seconds to nothing.

i became nothing.

This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends...

This is, indeed, the way the world ends.

Not with a bang, but a simperingly stupid (and very, very frightening) overuse of pointless technology.

From the Huffington Post:

Holographic idol Hatsune Miku is the creation of the group Crypton Future Media, using software from Vocaloid, and the group has put the avatar on tour with a live band. The sight of thousands of screaming fans waving glow sticks while the the holograph "performs" on stage is straight out of a science fiction novel.

Do not watch this video, immediately before sleeping.

(Ye were warned)

Outrage

Some stories are so outrageous, so contemptibly beyond the pale, that you're forced to wonder if we're living in a country that has lost its soul.

Two years ago, a 16 year-old Silsbee (TX) High School cheerleader identified as H. S., was abducted into a room by 3 football players, thrown onto the floor, and gang-raped. When others at the party ultimately came to her rescue, two of the rapists, including star athlete Rakheem Bolton, fled through a window, leaving their clothes behind (Bolton later returned and demanded his clothes from the homeowners, threatening to kill them when they hesitated).

H.S. and her family turned the matter over to the law. Like the woman in New York state whose serial-rapist is serving probation while she is sentenced real time, like the women in Iraq raped by civilian contractors whose crimes are actually protected by law, and like thousands of others seeking justice in our society today, H.S. discovered that the law was obviously not created for her.

First, her school decided it would be best for her to keep a low profile—avoid the cafeteria at lunchtime, forego the prom, stop cheerleading. H. S. decided that she was not going to be victimized anymore, though, and declined to behave as if she had committed a crime.

Then, the first grand jury not only declined to indict because of several juror's prejudices, these jurors released details of her sexual history into the community at large. At this time, Bolton and his fellow rapists were permitted to return to school, and athletics, while another grand jury was empanelled.

The situation came to a head February 27, 2009, at a play-off basketball game at which she was cheering, and the rapist Bolton was playing. During the first half, he was fouled twice, and it was customary for the cheerleaders to shout the players names before their free-throw attempts.

H.S. did not create a scene. She didn't wave her arms and scream obscenities at her rapist, did not assault him, did not regard him in any way. She refused, though, to cheer specifically for him. While the others called "Go Rakheem!" (have to wonder about them, don't you? what kind of self-loathing women are they growing in Silsbee?), she folded her arms, stepped back, and remained mute.

At half-time, the shit hit the fan.

From Sports Illustrated:

"It was the administrators against me," she recalls. As fans walked by, the cheerleader, dressed in her maroon-and-white uniform, was reduced to tears by a powerful posse: Silsbee superintendent Richard Bain, principal Gaye Lokey and cheerleading coach Sissy McInnis. Voices raised, they issued an ultimatum to the 16-year-old: Cheer for Rakheem Bolton or go home. "It wasn't right," she says.
(...)
(She) was scolded "in front of God and everybody," says her father. H.S. had not "abided by the Cheerleader Constitution," according to Hunt. The code requires cheerleaders to shout equally for all. Rather than cheer for Bolton, she chose to go home.

The violation was apparently so egregious that as H.S. walked into cheerleading class the following Monday, McInnis met her with this hello: Go to the principal's office. H.S. was kicked off the squad. Within an hour her father was in Bain's office. "I asked him, 'Are you telling me that my daughter had to cheer for her [attacker]?'" recalls the father. "He told me that if it means she had to cheer for Bolton or be removed, then that's what I'm telling you."

Her family filed suit on her behalf, to force the school to recognize her constitutional right to free speech. Earlier this month, the radically conservative fifth circuit court of appeals not only denied her request as frivolous, but ordered her family to pay all court costs. Women need not apply for justice from among the likes of Garza, Clement, Owen, or Jones (Esquires).

Her rapists were quickly indicted by the second grand jury. However, big-shot athlete Bolton was given a sweetheart accomidation by the special prosecutor, David Barlow, and the Judge, Joe Bob (I'm not making this up) Golden—both of whom, coincidentally, are big-time supporters of Silsbee athletics. In September, Bolton pled guilty to a lesser charge of Class A Assault and was sentenced to one year in prison, suspended by the judge in lieu of two years probation, a $2,500 fine, community service. And an anger management course (he threatened the homeowners, remember? That'll teach him.). He will not be required to register as a sex offender, and is free to pursue his big-time football dreams.

From KFDM news:

Bolton says he wants to move on with his life and get back to the sport he loves."College, play football," said Bolton. "Everything else I wanted to do, I can finally do it now." While Bolton is looking ahead in his life, he also looks back on the impact of the case on the former cheerleader. "I have no hard feelings," said Bolton. "I never have and I feel like it was just a misunderstanding."

Big of him to forgive her, huh? Rape so often is just a case of misunderstanding, isn't it? So easy to misconstrue what a woman wants when she's being pinned down on the floor, screaming for help. No, this guy will never be back in the system, will he?

There's just so many things wrong with this story that it makes me really, really sick. I know the one from New York is just as egregious, as are more than we can count these days, but this one happened in Texas, and I'm feeling low enough as it is about the political future of my home state. And my nation.

The pig I hold most accountable for this nonsense is the superintendent of schools (who also, incidentally, sits on the board of the Silsbee Chamber of Commerce). He had it in his power to diffuse this situation many times, and instead spitefully, misogynistically, fanned the flames. A little basic human kindness was all that was required, you know?

As for Rakheem, it's probably too late to change his woman-hating ass. A glance at his facebook bio tells you that he is not the brightest of lights, nor the most humble:

My name is Rakheem aka roc but my girl calls me daddy. in my spare time i like to chill wit my fat mama adriane…i love sports im a genius in football some may call it a master mind…well anything else yu wanna know yu can ask my adriane cause she knows more than me lol…

Doubtlessly, he will hurt women again, and maybe someday he'll even be punished for it.

Here's all the contact info I could find. I encourage you to send emails, make phone calls, let em know they don't live in a vacuum. The world will remember Silsbee's name.

Richard Bain Jr., Superintendent, Silsbee Independent School District: (address) 415 Highway 327 West, Silsbee, TX, 77656; email rbain@silsbeeisd.org; phone (409)980-7800/(409)980-7824
Eldon Franco, Principal, Silsbee High School: (address) 1575 Highway 96 North, Silsbee, TX, 77656-4799; email efranco@silsbeeisd.org; phone (409)980-7800
David Barlow, Atty. at Law: (address) 485 Milam Street, Beaumont, TX 77701-3518 phone (409) 838-2168
Silsbee Chamber of Commerce: (address) 545 North 5th StreetSilsbee, TX 77656-4038; phone (409) 385-5562

The Ms. Blog story and petition is here.
And here is a link to the Silsbee Independent School District page.

La Maison Rose

(For Wallace Stevens)

i

This house was made from oak
and ash and cottonwood, felled
and hewn from nearby woods,
half-timbered, mortised and tenoned,
plastered with teutonic precision
by old-country artisans from down
south who blew in, performed
their crafts, then blew away again.
They never gave this Pink House
another thought.

ii

Playboys and Troubadours have livened
these walls and Luke the Drifter's
given odes to whippoorwills and light.
Voices here echo mathematical harmonies.
Even the cantilevered roof that covers
the back porch reflects the essential
geometry of exception—the lurid trill
of an albino skunk, the weird mooing
of a horse who believes herself a cow—
integers, crucial as any, in the equation
that explains our Pink House.

iii

We are wearers of earth, who live here,
wrapped in the lineaments of place.
At night, we're warmed by filaments
of muttons—in sleep, we dream
upon foul plumes. Waking, our heads
and feet are armored by epidermides
of beeves, our bodies arrayed
in hirsute bolls. We die when we're old,
are folded inside, vested in oak,
in maggots and loam.

iv

Our edifice of light is square by design
and towerless, bereft of palms,
but glories in tuftless ordinary days.
It is a place of windows, though, and stars
and a receiver of suns and moons.
It is known to every kind of wind,
moans in August for the odor of rain,
and creaks under the restless weight
of human purpose. Barely civilized, it longs
for the promiscuous pleasures of entropy.

v

Our imagination has joined
with this house, and Cosmos.
Our walls are thin.

Keats

In the film Chariots of Fire, when Andrew Lindsay joins Harold Abrahams in attempting to beat the clock round the courtyard at Trinity College, he proclaims that he is doing so on behalf of John Keats, which causes the gathered students to cheer, with great fervor. Almost certainly apocryphal, the scene is nonetheless illustrative, not only of a time when students read poetry for the joy of it, but of the special place that Keats occupies within the ecstatic human consciousness.

Paula Jane was reading to me from his sonnets earlier today, and reminded me that I had missed his birthday—215 years old, Sunday before last—and we were both marvelling at the power and sensuality of his verses. Keats is among the rare poets whose name has become a descriptor for far more than the symbol of a man or woman; as with the great poets, he represents an essence, and in common with Shelley, his is such that the sound of his name quickens the pulse and races the heart, because he is forever associated wth an approach to reality that rapturously regards the possibilities that dwell in the heart of every breathing moment.

His self-styled epitath, Here lies one whose name was writ in water, was intended to be a bitter comment on his legacy, but to me it has another meaning. Keats spoke from a place that somehow transfigured language into something approximating the essential, elemental as fire or wind or water. It is there his name is etched, into the foundations of our awareness, a place where mere language cannot impress.

Even if you've read this poem 100 times, read it again, and remember why you loved this great poet in the first place:

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever-or else swoon to death.

(Note: I copied this poem at Poemhunter.com, and was amused to see that the readership there rated this poem as being 7.6 on the 1-10 scale...Tough graders, I guess—lol)

Anecdote of the Sombrero

Among the many-hatted secular set
Henry prevails, like the shrewd surprise
Vince delivered to the hard-hearted

French whore, her sensibility mock-frail
as the clip-board-attached-to-a-man
at Fresh Plus, who claims that love

is best kept hidden beneath a bushel
of boscs, or a peck of pickled prigs—
no one owns the sidewalk, though,

and Henry is free to come and go
from end to end according to his pure
intent, his keen rhomboidal sentience

an elliptical plea upon the deaf and blind
and multiplying. He is the god of alternative
headware. Urbanity wilts, under his feet.