The fall 2007 issue of Boulevard includes a poem by Frank Wilson, the book review editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and proprietor of Books, Inq. As a bonus, Frank contributes to a symposium on the Internet and literature. What strikes me about the poem, “Entering the Black Sea,” is its recycling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and how that story has remained irresistible to artists for millennia. In the last century, writers as various as Rilke, Auden, Pynchon and Guy Davenport further mutated the ever-mutating story. In The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets (2005), Michael Schmidt writes about Orpheus as a historical being, a real poet, and that’s how subsequent poets have often treated him. In the year before his own death at age 93 in 2004, Czeslaw Milosz’s American wife, Carol, died. In a biographical note appended to Milosz’s Selected Poems: 1931-2004, Robert Hass writes:
“After his wife died unexpectedly, and rather cruelly – she was so much younger than he and they were so happy together – he was alone with Polish again. He said to friends, in the difficult days after her death, that he was surviving by incantation. One of the forms that incantation took was an elegy to his wife framed as a retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the myth that he had read in Ovid as a schoolboy.”
“Orpheus and Eurydice” is the last poem in Selected Poems. Narrated in the third-person, here’s the final, heartbreaking stanza:
“Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds.
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!
How will I live without you, my consoling one!
But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,
And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.”
In Wilson’s hands, Orpheus narrates his own tale of love and loss, pursued by the hounds of hell. Without Eurydice, he is nothing: “The only songs I sing/Are those I bore from our embrace.” Here’s the ninth of the 18 seven-line stanzas:
“I have never shaken the smell of death,
Have been shunned, by women scorned,
Fled from by children. Whatever
Song may come of this shall not be
Mine. This is a poem I must live,
And living, die from, the fate
Hellish incantation prophesied.”
In the poem, Orpheus recalls the story of Actaeon, who spied Artemis bathing and was warned by the goddess never to speak or he would be turned into a stag. He inadvertently called out to others in his hunting party and, once he had become a stag, was torn to shreds by his own dogs. Frank’s version stops before Orpheus is torn up by the Maenads, as does Milosz’s. Both poems emphasize Orpheus’ devastation at the loss of a spouse. Wilson, in a moving gesture, dedicates his poem to Debbie, his wife. The poem is not available online, but please shell out $8 for the hard copy, where you’ll also be able to read this from Frank’s contribution to the symposium on the Internet and literature:
“Who knows what literary potential blogging may have? But consider this: The essay began as Montaigne’s method of exploring the contents of his consciousness, but quickly morphed into a vehicle for displaying literary style. Blogging may bring it back to what Montaigne was originally aiming at.”
That’s precisely what some of us are trying to do.
“After his wife died unexpectedly, and rather cruelly – she was so much younger than he and they were so happy together – he was alone with Polish again. He said to friends, in the difficult days after her death, that he was surviving by incantation. One of the forms that incantation took was an elegy to his wife framed as a retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the myth that he had read in Ovid as a schoolboy.”
“Orpheus and Eurydice” is the last poem in Selected Poems. Narrated in the third-person, here’s the final, heartbreaking stanza:
“Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds.
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!
How will I live without you, my consoling one!
But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,
And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.”
In Wilson’s hands, Orpheus narrates his own tale of love and loss, pursued by the hounds of hell. Without Eurydice, he is nothing: “The only songs I sing/Are those I bore from our embrace.” Here’s the ninth of the 18 seven-line stanzas:
“I have never shaken the smell of death,
Have been shunned, by women scorned,
Fled from by children. Whatever
Song may come of this shall not be
Mine. This is a poem I must live,
And living, die from, the fate
Hellish incantation prophesied.”
In the poem, Orpheus recalls the story of Actaeon, who spied Artemis bathing and was warned by the goddess never to speak or he would be turned into a stag. He inadvertently called out to others in his hunting party and, once he had become a stag, was torn to shreds by his own dogs. Frank’s version stops before Orpheus is torn up by the Maenads, as does Milosz’s. Both poems emphasize Orpheus’ devastation at the loss of a spouse. Wilson, in a moving gesture, dedicates his poem to Debbie, his wife. The poem is not available online, but please shell out $8 for the hard copy, where you’ll also be able to read this from Frank’s contribution to the symposium on the Internet and literature:
“Who knows what literary potential blogging may have? But consider this: The essay began as Montaigne’s method of exploring the contents of his consciousness, but quickly morphed into a vehicle for displaying literary style. Blogging may bring it back to what Montaigne was originally aiming at.”
That’s precisely what some of us are trying to do.
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