Apr 25, 2016 Free Verse, NaPoWriMo, Original Poetry
Ishmael – A Fever in a Dream
©April 25th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
The whale sings of coral, and of algae
The whale sings of deep sea divers
Who dive for the perfect pearl
The Pearl of the World.
And as they come and go,
The whale watches from afar,
And sings her lonely song
Waiting for her pod,
For she is lost, as she sings:
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And, singing, she turns
About and around, and bursts to breach
The surface, and startle the waiting sky,
Her heartbreak and her loneliness
Breathe song into the listening air,
And pull in longing into her lungs.
Without hope, without despair,
Without sorrow or pain,
She sings these thoughts:
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
But she knows nothing of saints,
She knows nothing of pity.
The sound of whale-song,
Is what fills her heart.
She sings and she sings, and no one
Hears her, save a sailor or three
Whose names might be Ishmael,
Or, mayhap, Ahab, or Other.
Falsely is she named
And falsely pursued.
But in the end, she escapes
Them all, for in the end,
She finds her pod,
As they swim towards her,
With welcoming flukes
And welcome songs,
As she sings hers:
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea.
In the end, all humans die
On the heaving heart of water,
Save one, just the one,
And in the end, does this man
Roam the wide, wide sea.
An albatross around his neck,
Swings like a pendulum,
Marking the days, the hours
That tick by, as he thirsts
Endlessly, and cries to the skies:
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
Or, perhaps, it’s a cross
The one he bears, and will bear
Till the end of his days,
As he cries for respite.
Or, perhaps, it’s a pendant
Full of flash and beauty
Signifying nothing, just a piece
Of coral and a pearl on a string
Torn from the gut of a
Dying sea-thing.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
He thirsts and he cries,
This lonely man, as he’s found,
And he rises among the pod,
A man among whales.
And as they hold him aloft,
Forgiving him the ills
Of his kind. He bursts
Into a thousand points
Of light, and dissolves
Himself in salt and water
And makes of himself
A feast for the sea.
And the whale, flowing
In his wake, cries for him
As he re-forms, and grows
Into plankton to feed her.
And she eats and sings:
“Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
This man who drifted
Took pity on my soul
In agony.
“And offered of himself
That I might feed.
My pod is the pod of
Ishmael, and we shall
Roam the seas, always singing,
‘Remember this man
This Ishmael, this lost one,
Who roamed for years,
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea!’
And take heart, for he
Lives among us, still.
_________________________________________________________________
In response to Day 25 prompt from NaPoWrimo:
(I guess I chose a magic-realist route!)
And now for our (optional) prompt! Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that begins with a line from a another poem (not necessarily the first one), but then goes elsewhere with it. This will work best if you just start with a line of poetry you remember, but without looking up the whole original poem. (Or, find a poem that you haven’t read before and then use a line that interests you). The idea is for the original to furnish a sort of backdrop for your work, but without influencing you so much that you feel stuck just rewriting the original!. For example, you could begin, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” or “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” or “I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster,” or “they persevere in swimming where they like.” Really, any poem will do to provide your starter line – just so long as it gives you the scope to explore. Happy writing!
Tags: #Ahab, #Coleridege references, #Ishmael, #Poetic references and allusions, #TheRimeoftheAncientMariner, S.T. Coleridge
Oct 5, 2015 Ramblings and Musings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0XYZNx6854
I’m in the mood for Keats!
When I was young, about ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen — I was madly in love with the Romantic Poets — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, plus a poet who SHOULD have been a Romantic Poet, but is categorized as a Victorian Poet — Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I LOVED all the poetry I read, and would sit with my Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Poetry, which I bought in a tiny alley in a busy shopping area in the city of Madras, now Chennai, India. I would walk around with this book in hand, and drink, nay inhale, the poems therein — keep in mind I was only ten, then. (I also climbed trees, read Enid Blyton, comics, Mad Magazine and all manner of stuff, apart from reading English Romantic poetry. Oh, I read Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Blake and others, too, of course, and loved it all. But it was the poetry of the Romantic Age that caught me in its net. The influence of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on me is incalculable, even if I may not mirror them in my own work. It’s the feeling, the emotion, the magic of their language that ensnared me. And above all, it was John Keats who spun a silent web in which I was happy to be trapped.
Strangely, I didn’t memorize his poetry the way I memorized WW or Coleridge, or Eliot in the 20th century. I just drowned in his evocative moods, much as a bee might drown in a flower, drunk and delirious, and not bothering to analyze why.
These three poems, especially, moved me greatly:
Ode to a Nightingale – John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn – John Keats
La Belle Dame Sans Merci — John Keats
When you read his lyrical, melancholic, musing, dream-imagistic poetry, you’ll see why I love him so much.
I always wonder what he would have been like had he lived beyond the age of 25. It makes me deeply sad to think of those whose flame burned so brightly that it consumed them (or so, I think fancifully, but it really was about the lack of good medicine in those days).
To know more, here’s good old Wikipedia on John Keats!
Tags: English Poetry, Fancy, John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Autumn, Romantic Poetry, S.T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth