I'm working on a poem for my next workshop, and my feet keep coming out all wrong:
Métis (a fragment after Keats)
I.
Volcanic Age: young gods but newly bound,
And she a barefoot girl with owl's eyes
The source's maid, Oceanus' sound
And gentle counsel; mother of the wise
Girl Tritogenia, migrainous surprise
Athena: seahorse child of Zeus' crown.
Wise Counsel slept mornings in, hair unbound
Gainst Zeus’ thund’rous arms, soft igneous thighs
Like rocks smoothed soft by rivers; longing lovers drown’d.
II.
As dreamers sleep conjoin’d in Jungian fens,
Their exit breaths informing ev’nings gloam,
And lovers drown in exhalations -- men
Drawn off the path by light from phantom homes
As Aphrodite, luminescent, roams
The cookie-batter continents again.
So Métis, turning in her sleep, a wren
Spelunking snugly in her mountain home,
As biggest boy exhaled a soft psookhen.
But really. You try fitting Tritogenia and Oceanus into a Spencerian stanza. And that psookhen bit? Totally not sure about it. But see the liguistic path from 'psyche? Eh? Eh?
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1 comment:
Ah my young HD! A very ambitious piece. I love how you mix classical forms with modern and classical diction. Its after Keats without being fake keasian.
Most irreverent thought --is the myth of Zeus and Metis the source of the song there was an old lady who swallowed a fly?
I think this has real potential. I think the psooken can work. Can you give it more context?
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