RILKE: EATING THE POPPY WITH THE DEAD

Moscow from Ostankino TV station
* 

Only he who has lifted the lyre
also among the shadows
may render
infinite praise.

One he who has eaten
of the poppy with the dead
will never again lose
the most delicate tone.

Though the reflections in the pool
often blur before your eyes:
Know the image.

Only in the double realm
do voices become
gentle and eternal.

~ Rilke, 9th Sonnet to Orpheus, Pt. I
(I reworked the translation by Herter Norton)

A poet must know about death and dying, and about the terrible experiences in general. S/he needs to know both the up-close specifics (“know the image”) and the long perspective: the larger journey of life, including mortality. That’s why there are no child prodigies among poets. There is no substitute for a certain minimum of life experience and for the wisdom of a greater perspective. That’s how a poet’s voice becomes both compassionate (“gentle”) and — to some degree, like the “shadows” that live in the underworld of our memories and dreams — eternal.

In the first stanza of Sonnet 6, Rilke states this about Orpheus:

Is he from here? No, his wide nature
was formed in both realms.
He better bends the branches of willows
who knows the roots of the willows.

Great poetry goes beyond what I call “superior journalism”; it partakes of the Underworld.  

 
The Underworld needs to be understood more broadly, not just as the mythical realm of the dead. Certain losses are so great that they feel like death. Painful experiences are sometimes described as the descent to the Underworld. And that descent is repeated when the memories come back.

A lot of people who've been through “fascinating” experiences never write about them, even if they ar
e writers or have a writer to help them. I learned the hard way that the reason is too much Underworld, i.e. too much pain (for instance, I am often encouraged to write about my first year in the US, which was indeed full of revelations and much comedy; but, alas, not just comedy; in addition, as Milosz observed, "It is late and the truth is laborious”).

And yet to the extent that one can endure wandering through the underworld of painful memories, there is the potential prize of emerging with deeper understanding. The danger is depression and even suicide. Another danger, rarely mentioned, is sheer exhaustion that makes one incapable of using that depth in a creative way. The Underworld is no country for old men. The old should live in the now, and/or in the paradise of good memories. To come out singing, one needs excellent brain function. Having a supportive partner also helps.

Never mind the four (!!) classical muses of poetry. The true muse is 1) Mnemosyne, i.e. Memory 2) Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. She can guide us, and remind us that springtime comes. We descend, we ascend. (If the poet identifies with Orpheus, then the muse is Eurydice. Yes, there are male Eurydices.)

It’s interesting that Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus mention Eurydice only once — “Be forever dead in Eurydice” in Sonnet 13, Part 2 (“Be ahead of all parting”). Rilke’s wrote a great Eurydice poem in his youth — “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.” It was inspired by the death of the painter Paula Becker; all biographers state that Rilke was in love with Paula, possibly more than with Clara. But eventually the memory of Paula faded; besides, after that great Eurydice poem, more poems on the theme were not needed.

In his mature years, Rilke identified with Orpheus, but he had no Eurydice we can point to. One answer may be that he was his own Eurydice; he was both the singer and the lost beloved, the sum of his unfulfilled yearnings. True: Vera, the young dancer who died of leukemia, does appear in Sonnet 28, Pt. 2, and may be implied in Sonnet 29 — but is definitely not much of presence in the Sonnets as a whole. Rilke was never in love with her; he didn’t even know her. 

But he knew the Underworld passages of himself, where the personal past comes alive, but often in a transformed manner. If you can wander among your memories quietly, without agitation over the old wounds, you can see the supra-personal, universal aspects of life. Already in first part of The Book of Hours, Rilke states:

I love the dark hours of my being.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s timeless and wide.

I love the idea of contemplating our past as “legend.” Given the nature of memory, our past actually is that. But I mean a traditional “golden and enhanced” meaning of legend. With detachment as we recognize our role as narrators, we can view our past as part of the larger story. This can lead to a wider, calmer, more self-affirming perspective where we can treat ourselves with more tolerance, kindness, and even unembarrassed love. 

I saw this when the incident of being told I had no talent became a “legend” to me when, with enough writing behind me, and publications and awards, I was secure enough to think and talk about it. I also felt the connection with writers and actors with similar stories: early rejection, being told they did not have a chance in the world.

As I have Jung say in my “Jung to Eurydice” poem, “You mustn’t take your life personally.”

 
Adriaen van Utrecht, Still Life with Flowers and Skull, 1642
 
And Rilke knew his longing for the “unknown beloved.” Let me quote me the first part of what is perhaps his greatest and most universal love poem:

You who never arrived 

in my arms, Beloved,
you who were lost from the start —

I don’t even know what songs

would please you. I have given up
trying to recognize you in the surging wave
of the next moment.  All the immense
images in me — the deeply felt

landscapes, cities, towers, bridges,
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands 
that were once 
pulsing 
with the life of the gods —

all rise within me to mean 
you, 
who forever elude me.

I feel the unknown beloved, the one who has never arrived, is universal, or nearly so. It’s really the idealized image of ourselves. Here Rilke projects it on everything that ever touched him deeply, as if to announce the presence of her “who never arrived.” And he’s wise enough to know that she was “lost from the start.” This, I think, was Rilke’s Eurydice.

But even she is not present in the Sonnets to Orpheus — except in the form I’ll touch on later.



If Eurydice is absent, if love for her who was “lost from the start” is not the guiding inspiration of the Sonnets, then what is their dominant theme? Perhaps we shouldn’t think of a single theme, but rather an intertwining of several ones. One of those strands is the theme of abundance — of the generosity of life and the world, bestowing their beauty on anyone who takes the time to look. Thus the overall tone of praise of the world, of wonderment — even astonishment — at the beauty all around, both natural and man-made (Rilke was more familiar with city parks than with forests). He rejoices even in the stone Atlases bracing the balconies.

The Sonnets are what I call “comfort poems.” They keep on saying that despite suffering and the knowledge of approaching death, we have been given so much that we have no reason to complain. In Jack Gilbert’s words, “We have already lived in the real paradise.” So, in Sonnet 22, 2, the speaker exclaims

O despite fate: the glorious overflowings
of our existence, foamed over into parks —
or as stone men based the bases
of high portals, braced under balconies!

But the modern age introduced speed, so we pass the buildings and other wonders too quickly:

Today the abundances plunge past, the same ones,
but only as haste, our of the horizontal yellow
day into the dazzlingly magnified night.


**

Not that the world is benevolent. It is magnificent without being benevolent. That’s the source of the human difficulty: the world is not a tender parent. Suffering awaits; death awaits. Yet most people are not bitter; they are reasonably happy. The famous “Be ahead of all parting” sonnet (13, 2) exhorts us to be jubilant while fully accepting suffering and mortality.

Be ahead of all parting as if were behind you,
like the winter that’s already passed by.
For among the winters there’s one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it can the heart survive.

Be forever dead in Eurydice — singing rise up,
praising rise up back into pure relation.
Here, among the waning, in the realm of decline,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Be — but know the not being where all things begin,
the infinite ground of your own deep vibration,
that you may fulfill it this one single time.

To all that’s used up, muffled and dumb,
store of full nature, the uncountable sums,
joyfully add yourself and cancel the count.

*

Critics sometimes call Rilke a “great poet of death.” This is not the case in the Sonnets. The dead make a brief appearance at best — in the Ninth Sonnet, as the Underworld shadows that help a poet master the “double realm,” and in the Fourteenth Sonnet (pt 1), where Rilke unexpectedly  hints that they are jealous of the living. Rilke, already transformed into a giver of praise to life, still tentatively grants them power — but only in the form of a question, to which we are free to answer “No.” It’s a beautiful stanza, and that’s the real reason for my quoting it:

Or are they the masters, as they sleep
beside the roots and grant us, from their riches,
this hybrid thing of speechless strength and kisses?

It could all be explicated in terms of compost fertilizing the earth. Even so, that’s the most gorgeous stanza about compost ever written.

By the way, in the last sonnet (“Silent friend of many distances”), there is no question of the dead being in any way “the masters.” Rather, the dead continue to serve life. Their having been still “enlarges space.”

What about those experiences that are so painful they feel like a kind of death? Rilke doesn’t hesitate in his advice:

What is the deepest loss you ever suffered?
If drinking’s bitter, turn into wine.

Perhaps creative people are the luckiest in the world: they can indeed turn even the most bitter experiences into the wine of art.

Rodin: Orpheus, Eurydice

*

From a quasi-monk of the first great collection of his youth, The Book of Hours, where he tried to forge a new “neighborly” relationship with the antiquated figure of god, Rilke transformed himself into a worshipper of the earth and of life (“Just to be here is magnificent” in the Seventh Duino Elegy; note that the Elegies quickly abandon the angels).

And note that even the Unknown Beloved is presented mainly as the earth: landscapes and cities. And that too is a poem of Rilke’s mature years.

This new embrace of the earth becomes obvious even in those poems that still rely on religious myth. But now it is life, not the afterlife, that is celebrated. In the Ninth Elegy, Rilke becomes the bridegroom of the earth. Erde, du Liebe, ich will — “Earth, my love, I will” — the vow of a marriage ceremony.

But this new dedication to this life, this world, becomes apparent also in various other poems of the later period.

Speak softly, God! It could mean to someone
that the trumpets of your kingdom called;
for their sound no depth is deep enough:
then all times rise out of the stones,
and all the long-lost appear
in faded linen, brittle skeletons,
crooked from the weight of their soil.
That will be a miraculous return
into a wondrous homeland.

~ Rilke, from “The Last Judgment”

That “wondrous homeland” is the earth — all of earth. But we should also remember that most people used to get buried in the towns and villages where they were lived; the “wondrous homeland” was the familiar trees and grasses, the same river, the same meadows of clouds in the sky. In Wuthering Heights, Catherine didn’t want to stay in heaven; she wanted to return to the moors. All readers understand this at the deepest level; the real heaven we want is the place we already love, or used to love in childhood and youth — our first great love.

Mount Denali

**

And now for something entirely different:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to1xT93IlUI

and since we could all use a cup of kindness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPnhaGWBnys

LET’S BRAVELY DIVE INTO 2016 — ESPECIALLY SINCE WE HAVE NO CHOICE!

ORPHEUS AFTER EURYDICE

O'KEEFE: THE BLACK IRIS

Don’t tell me that Orpheus failed.

An artist understands about faith –

the hours, the years, the life,

watching a blossom disclose

its throat, the secret

fur on the narrow tongue –

a blood-tinged light

crossing the perilous curve

of the corolla’s horizon,

nun-like petals that hide

the passion of patience inside,
a burgundy cleft in the heart

cowled with a hood of blue –

Look long enough at anything,

and it will grow in you –

One breath from embracing

black, in the center

of the blossom of your life,

he won’t turn:

not the Orpheus who sang

so much better after love, after death.

~ Oriana

**

Too many poems about Orpheus. Too many poems about O’Keefe. But let’s face it: these figures, one mythical, one historical, have turned into archetypes that shape our personal and collective psyche. The interpretations can be endless, and they keep on coming.

Why? Why do these stories have such great staying power over the millennia? Why, just in the last decade, hundreds of new poems about Orpheus? Is it that we too have tried to save someone we loved, gone through hell and back to rescue our beloved – and failed? Is it that we are all betrayers? Or is it that we all wait for the magical person to be save us and lead us to the world of light, and the savior is bound to betray us?

Or is it more simple: we try and try to find the answer as to why Orpheus turned around. Would we have been capable of absolute faith?

These are huge questions. My poem takes a more “narrow slice,” and looks at Orpheus as artist. An artist has to have infinite faith and patience. Georgia O’Keefe knew that, so I posit that it was difficult for her to accept the myth. Orpheus the poet and musician, through his years of disciplined, passionate patience, would not have turned.

Yet perhaps it’s not the turning or not turning that is of critical importance here, but the loss of the beloved.  If we have lived a while, we all come to know this loss.  It changes us, and, if we are artists, we unwillingly admit that we have become better artists as a result. As Louise Glück says, “I have lost my Eurydice . . . and it seems to me I have never been in better voice.”

Another aspect of an important myth is that it is timeless. In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the critical moment of his turning around becomes an eternal moment.  There is a suspension of time, the way it seems to happen to important memories. For instance, I am always that seventeen-year-old girl who is boarding the jet that will take her across the Iron Curtain (remember that phrase?) to the West. I can easily imagine a scientist, weary after many hours in the lab, at the moment of discovery. And I can imagine Orpheus forever holding within him the image of Eurydice’s face just before it dissolved. The exquisite poem by Lenny Lianne is a meditation on this moment.

ORPHEUS AFTER EURYDICE

Over and over he recalls

the clockwise motion of his body at the bend

in the uphill path as he turned
to glance back, and glimpsed her gazing at him.

Before her face scattered, swept away
as if in a roiling sandstorm, her looking back
at him rippled through his whole body,
binding them together.

In the same clockwise motion seconds turn
into minutes and are worn down, compacted
into memory, his image of her watching him
fills his new afterlife, so when he closes

his eyes to recall her, he remains unsure
is it he who sails through the space
that excludes her, or is it she
who travels across it and keeps coming toward him.

            ~ Lenny Lianne

**

This poem is an example of taking a very “narrow slice.” The music and the imagery turn on each other, imitating the turning motion of Orpheus. But he isn’t the only one who performs an action. Eurydice, usually presented as a passive character who does no more than disperse like smoke after the fatal glance, returns his glance, and in that glance they are united forever: she keeps coming toward him.  

Michael Peterson:

I think the fault in Orpheus's turn is with Hades, not Orpheus, just as in the ludicrous instruction to Lot to not look back at Sodom and Gomorrah. We look back – it's what we do.

I love your poem, especially juxtaposed to O'Keefe's painting. Very powerful (and erotic). You mention a suspension of time in your comments. I think of these as stopped clock moments. I have many in my life, tattooed across my soul, still very much alive and influential.

**

Oriana:

Thank you, Michael, for your perceptive comment, which hangs here like a shining fruit on the Tree of Knowledge. Yes, we turn and yes, we eat the Forbidden Fruit. Positing God's existence, that was his cunning scheme to ensure that the fruit would be eaten.

Jorie specializes in presenting the moment just before the transformation. We know how the story ends; she forces us to stay in the “before,” the glance, the fruit, already within us, but still unravished, always just about to happen, to step into the eternal.


**

Marjorie:

“Orpheus after Eurydice” is short, to the point, and very skillful.  And it is quite interesting from the standpoint of what it does with physics.  There's Orpheus's ending question of whether he moves toward Eurydice to close the distance between them or whether it's Eurydice who moves toward him (though never quite arriving, so that Orpheus's fantasy of gaining Eurydice is never really consummated).  I also thought that using "clockwise" motion at the beginning of the poem was very clever, since it allowed Lenny to use "clockwise" again to describe the seconds and minutes during which Orpheus might have gained Eurydice but then, in a trice, lost her.  It's a haunting story, this tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, and I think Lenny's poem captures the haunting uncertainty in it.

THE SEEN VERSUS THE REAL: JORIE GRAHAM’S “ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE”

Felice Casorati, Ritratto di Silvana Cenni, 1922


ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE

Up ahead, I know, he felt it stirring in himself already, the glance,   

the darting thing in the pile of rocks,

already in him, there, shiny in the rubble, hissing Did you want to remain   

completely unharmed?—

the point-of-view darting in him, shiny head in the ash-heap,

hissing Once upon a time, and then Turn now darling give me that look,   

that perfect shot, give me that place where I’m erased....

The thing, he must have wondered, could it be put to rest, there, in the glance,   

could it lie back down into the dustiness, giving its outline up?

When we turn to them—limbs, fields, expanses of dust called meadow and avenue—

will they be freed then to slip back in?

Because you see he could not be married to it anymore, this field with minutes in it   

called woman, its presence in him the thing called

future—could not be married to it anymore, expanse tugging his mind out into it, tugging the wanting-to-finish out.

What he dreamed of was this road (as he walked on it), this dustiness,   

but without their steps on it, their prints, without   

song—

What she dreamed, as she watched him turning with the bend in the road (can you

understand this?)—what she dreamed   

was of disappearing into the seen

not of disappearing, lord, into the real—

And yes she could feel it in him already, up ahead, that wanting-to-turn-and-

cast-the-outline-over-her

by his glance,

sealing the edges down,

saying I know you from somewhere darling, don’t I,   

saying You’re the kind of woman who etcetera—

(Now the cypress are swaying) (Now the lake in the distance)   

(Now the view-from-above, the aerial attack of do you

remember?)—

now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be recalled,   

now the glance reaching her shoreline wanting only to be taken in,

(somewhere the castle above the river)

(somewhere you holding this piece of paper)   

(what will you do next?) (—feel it beginning?)   

now she’s raising her eyes, as if pulled from above,

now she’s looking back into it, into the poison the beginning,

giving herself to it, looking back into the eyes,

feeling the dry soft grass beneath her feet for the first time now the mind

looking into that which sets the ___________ in motion and seeing in there

a doorway open nothing on either side

(a slight wind now around them, three notes from up the hill)

through which morning creeps and the first true notes—

For they were deep in the earth and what is possible swiftly took hold.

~ Jorie Graham

 **

Lenny Lianne:

It's hard to look at just one poem in Graham's book [The End of Beauty] as all seem connected.

As always in Graham, time is one of the themes. Here, she implies that every moment is already inside him (and us?) and waiting or impatient to be realized. And/or there is one eternal moment waiting to be realized and that one moment negates, or undermines, the concept of future.

As for Eurydice, she realizes he has this moment within him and goes forward to meet it. For her, the glance embodies being seen and her image taken within him. It embodies recognition and she reaches for that recognition by looking at him looking at her.

**

Oriana:

I think Lenny's analysis is very perceptive. Eurydice fully anticipates that annihilating glance.

What she dreamed, as she watched him turning with the bend in the road (can you

understand this?)—what she dreamed   

was of disappearing into the seen

not of disappearing, lord, into the real—

And yes she could feel it in him already, up ahead, that wanting-to-turn-and-

cast-the-outline-over-her

by his glance,

sealing the edges down,

saying I know you from somewhere darling, don’t I,   

saying You’re the kind of woman who etcetera—

and yes, Eurydice looks back into his eyes, since she wants to disappear into the seen (the perception, the literary story) rather than the real. I agree with Lenny that this could be understood as Eurydice's wanting Orpheus to carry her image within him, to seal herself within him forever, her face and body now indelible in his memory, the way she looks in the moment of his losing her. Rather than real life, she prefers this transformation into an eternal image.

Note that doorway that opens "nothing on either side" -- this could imply the void before birth and the void after dying. But myth and great art are immortal -- though constantly re-visioned.

A marvelous touch here is that the real is full of Hollywood-type clichés. This makes it easier for us to understand why Eurydice would reject it.

Note as well that the beginning of Graham's poem has in it the Rilkean impatience that seems to characterize Orpheus, his trying to anticipate the future (as well as reaching back into the past):

And his senses were as if divided:

while his sight ran ahead like a dog,
turned back, came and went again and again,
and waited at the next turn, positioned there –
his hearing was left behind like a scent.

. . .

This poem was written during a period when Graham was interested in the human desire for closure. We want something to end – we may even want the world to end – so we can see what the meaning was.

Another interesting aspect of the poem is the shifting point of view. We start with the glance being animated as a kind of tempting serpent, but eventually the main focus is Eurydice. It’s her active response, her decision to look back at Orpheus, even though it means her annihilation (though not in the realm of the story, “the seen”) that is the revision of the myth.

In Graham's third volume, The End of Beauty, the poem that precedes “Orpheus and Eurydice” is “Self-Portrait As Both Parties.” It’s yet another, indirect approach to the myth.

Imagine the silt and all that it was.

The grains that filter down to it through the open hand of the sunlight.

How its rays weaken down there. How when it comes to touch

that smoothest of girls the slow bottom of the river,

is it Orpheus as it glides on unharmed but really

turned back with its one long note that cannot

break down?

How would he bring her back again? She drifts up

in small hourglass-shaped cloud of silt where the sunlight touches,

up to where the current could take her,

up by the waist into the downstream motion again into the

hard sell, and for a moment even I can see

the garment of particles which would become her body,

swaying, almost within reason, this devil-of-the-bottom,

almost yoked again, almost quelling her weightlessness,

flirting here now with this handful of

mudfish his fingers touch silver . . .  But they gun

through the weeds, the weeds cannot hold her

who is all rancor, all valves now, all destination,

dizzy with wanting to sink back in,

thinning terribly in the holy separateness.

And though he would hold her up, this light all open hands,

seeking her edges, seeking to make her palpable again,

curling around her to find crevices by which to carry her up,

flaws by which to be himself arrested and made,

made whole, made sharp and limbed, a shape,

she cannot, the drowning is too kind,

the becoming of everything which each pore opens to again,

the possible which each momentary outline blurs into again,

too kind, too endlessly kind,

the silks of the bottom rubbing their vague hands

over her forehead, braiding her to

the sepulchral leisure, the body, the other place that is not minutes

~ from “Self-Portrait As Both Parties”

**

This is a Rilkean Eurydice, who wants to remain dead:

dizzy with wanting to sink back in,

thinning terribly in the holy separateness.

and

she cannot, the drowning is too kind,

the becoming of everything which each pore opens to again,

the possible which each momentary outline blurs into again,

too kind, too endlessly kind,

the silks of the bottom rubbing their vague hands

over her forehead, braiding her to

the sepulchral leisure, the body, the other place that is not minutes

-- I assume that "the body" is here the dead body, for which time doesn't exist. Or else it's the body as opposed to the mind; time exists for the mind.

Also, Eurydice can no longer be grasped. This is in line with the Ancient Greek conception of the shadows in the Underworld. Thus, Odysseus tries three times to embrace his dead mother, and cannot.

I shamelessly brought this poem in because I am enchanted by the beauty of it --

Imagine the silt and all that it was.

The grains that filter down to it through the open hand of the sunlight.

How its rays weaken down there. How when it comes to touch

that smoothest of girls the slow bottom of the river,

is it Orpheus as it glides on unharmed

-- and more gorgeous lines. The idea of sunlight being Orpheus is immensely original and poetic.

**

You may say, but what about women poets identifying with Eurydice, speaking in the persona of Eurydice? There is h.d.'s Eurydice ("At least I have the flowers of myself") and Linda Gregg's Eurydice. Those of you who participated in our discussion of Jack Gilbert will readily recognize that this is Eurydice-Linda speaking to Orpheus-Jack Gilbert. I find the line "You were always curious what love is like" especially revealing.

EURYDICE

I linger, knowing you are eager (having seen

the strange world where I live)

to return to your friends

wearing the bells and singing the songs

which are my mourning.

With the water in them, with their strange rhythms.

I know you will not take me back.

Will take me almost to the world,

but not out to house, color, leaves. 

Not to the sacred world that is so easy

for you my love.

Inside my mind and in my body is a darkness

which I am equal to, but my heart is not.

Yesterday you read the Troubadour poets

in the bathroom doorway

while I painted my eyes for the journey.

While I took tiredness away from my face,

you read of that singer in a garden

with the woman he swore to love forever.

You were always curious what love is like. 

Wanted to meet me, not bring me home.

Now you whistle, putting together

the new words, learning the songs

to tell the others how far you traveled for me.

Singing of my desire to live.

Oh, if you knew what you do not know

I could be in the world remembering this.

I did not cry as much in the darkness

as I will when we part in the dimness

near the opening which is the way in for you

and was the way out for me, my love.

                       

                                    ~ Linda Gregg, Too Bright to See

**

Here the biographical temptation is very strong, and we may start thinking, “Oh sure, Jack Gilbert messed up his first marriage with non-stop infidelities, his betrayals of her trust that he was committed to their life together, which led to divorce; his second wife, who in his poems seems devoid of her own personality [actually she was a sculptor], died, becoming Eurydice material for the troubadour's poems.”

We need to return to the poem itself, and surrender to its lyricism and its insight. Eurydice already knows how this will end: she will cry even more when they part because he does not really want to share his life and his world with her. At the same time, Eurydice’s last words are my love -- this is not h.d.’s angry Eurydice, but rather a sadder and wiser Eurydice who remains loving, but is perfectly resigned to what will happen.

And thus, by a commodious vicus we come back to Lenny’s comment that the end of the story is already contained in it long before it actually takes place. In fact one could argue that already the beginning contains the end; that's why Greek poets thought the first word was so important (e.g. the first word of the Iliad is rage). 

It is amazing to see the power of the myth to stay alive for thousands of years. Of course each writer (poet, composer, movie maker) sees it through a different lens. This means an eternal freshness and new attempts to grasp the mystery of life, love, and death. 

LINDA PASTAN'S "ORPHEUS"; H.D.'S "EURYDICE"

I know what some of you may be thinking: Orpheus has been "done to death" in poetry, music, and painting. And yet, and yet . . .  every Orpheus poem I've read, and that must be over a hundred by now, is different, and most are fascinating.  The story continues to haunt us, maybe because it's "unfinished business." Why did he turn? How did Eurydice feel about it? Was she furious and then self-empowered, as in h.d.'s Eurydice, or, as Rilke hints, relieved, since Orpheus ("she asked softly, Who?") ceased to mean anything to her. 

In fact, the first two stanzas of Linda Pastan's poem consist of questions. The last stanza ends with the "music of the body," different from the music of art. But ultimately it's the music of great art that survives, though it draws on the mysterious music of life that it must in the end survive. 


My favorite stanza is the first one, which poses the most important question, and has the magical phrase, "a fraction of darkness." 


Orpheus

When Orpheus turned

and looked back and knew

that genius wasn’t enough,

I wonder which he regretted most:

the failure of will,

Eurydice lost,

or what it must mean for her

to remain

a fraction of darkness?

Did he still tame animals

with his songs,

or would that seem a child’s game now?

Did he tune his lyre

to a minor key,

the last notes falling

like darkened leaves

to drift toward Lesbos?

In Balanchine’s ballet

the failure seems Eurydice’s fault

who tempted his blindfold off,

as if the artist must be absolved,

as if what matters

is the body itself –

that instrument stringed

with tendon and bone

making its own music.

   ~ Linda Pastan
      from A Fraction of Darkness


**


What did it mean to Eurydice to remain "a fraction of darkness"? More broadly, how does a woman feel when the man she thought a savior who would take her out of a hellish life into a larger, breathable world, betrays her in the last moment? (Not that it's ever wise to expect a man to be a savior -- see my "Tear Jars: Freud to Eurydice" poem


http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com/2010/05/freud-and-jung-to-eurydice.html


HD has an interesting poem in the persona of Eurydice. The last section is especially strong.  It is generally thought that in this poem the betrayer is D.H. Lawrence, but h.d. had a whole series of men, starting with Ezra Pound, to whom she looked up as saviors, who then left her. 

EURYDICE

So you have swept me back,

I who could have walked with the live souls

above the earth,

I who could have slept among the live flowers

at last;

so for your arrogance

and your ruthlessness

I am swept back

where dead lichens drip

dead cinders upon moss of ash;

so for your arrogance

I am broken at last,

I who had lived unconscious,

who was almost forgot;

if you had let me wait

I had grown from listlessness

into peace,

if you had let me rest with the dead,

I had forgot you

and the past.

II

Here only flame upon flame

and black among the red sparks,

streaks of black and light

grown colourless;

why did you turn back,

that hell should be reinhabited

of myself thus

swept into nothingness?

Why did you glance back?

why did you hesitate for that moment?

why did you bend your face

caught with the flame of the upper earth,

above my face?

What was it that crossed my face

with the light from yours

and your glance?

What was it you saw in my face?

The light of your own face,

the fire of your own presence?

What had my face to offer

but reflex of the earth,

haycinth colour

caught from the raw fissure in the rock

where the light struck,

and the colour of azure crocuses

and the bright surface of gold crocuses

and of the wind-flower,

swift in its veins as lightning

and as white.

                               III

Saffron from the fringe of the earth,

wild saffron that has bent

over the sharp edge of earth,

all the flowers that cut through the earth,

all, all the flowers are lost;

everything is lost,

everything is crossed with black,

black upon black

and worse than black,

this colourless light.

                               IV

Fringe upon fringe

of blue crocuses,

crocuses, walled against blue of themselves,

blue of that upper earth,

blue of the depth upon depth of flowers,

lost;

flowers,

if I could have taken once my breath of them,

enough of them,

more than earth,

even than of the upper earth,

had passed with me

beneath the earth;

if I could have caught up from the earth,

the whole of the flowers of the earth,

if once I could have breathed into myself

the very golden crocuses

and the red,

and the very golden hearts of the first saffron,

the whole of the golden mass,

the whole of the great fragrance,

I could have dared the loss.

                              V

So for your arrogance

and your ruthlessness

I have lost the earth   

and the flowers of the earth,

and the live souls above the earth,

and you who passed across the light

and reached

ruthless;

you who have your own light,

who are to yourself a presence,

who need no presence;

yet for all your arrogance

and your glance,

I tell you this:

such loss is no loss,

such terror, such coils and strands and pitfalls

of blackness,

such terror

is no loss;

hell is no worse than your earth

above the earth,

hell is no worse,

no, nor your flowers

nor your veins of light

nor your presence,

a loss;

my hell is no worse than yours

though you pass among the flowers and speak

with the spirits above earth.

VI

Against the black

I have more fervour

than you in all the splendour of that place,

against the blackness

and the stark grey

I have more light;

and the flowers,

if I should tell you,

you would turn from your own fit paths

toward hell,

turn again and glance back

and I would sink into a place

even more terrible than this.

                              VII

At least I have the flowers of myself,

and my thoughts, no god

can take that;

I have the fervour of myself for a presence

and my own spirit for light;

and my spirit with its loss

knows this;

though small against the black,

small against the formless rocks,

hell must break before I am lost;

before I am lost,

hell must open like a red rose

for the dead to pass.

      ~ h.d.

***

 I love the last stanza -- all of it, but especially "before I am lost, / hell must open like a red rose." I don't need the last line about the dead. The rose says it all.