See how magenta swabs wide Swaths across windswept mustard Cliff face bursting with pied Splashes of anemones spilling over Whitecaps of agitated blue—
Steady as the craft goes, lads, Make your master proud of you.
And if the soul is to know itself it must look into a soul:*
-------------------
The companions died in turn, with lowered eyes. Their oars mark the place where they sleep on the shore.**
From the notes to the 1968 edition of Seferis’ Collected Poems, edited by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard:
*The quotation is from Plato, Alcibiades, 133 B.
**See Homer, Od. Xi. 75ff.,where the shade of Elpenor, youngest of Odysseus’ companions, asks that his oar be planted on his seashore grave to perpetuate his memory.
The colour is happening down our way again in places but with nothing like this intensity. That magenta against the mustard - brash and bellowing life.
The euphoria of a moment of sheer poetic energy that explodes (bursts splashes spills) almost beyond the containment of the linguistic lifeboat.
ReplyDeleteAll hands on deck!
Outbreak, uplift, my hearties!
Yes, my hearties, but in the meanwhile see #4.
ReplyDeleteAnd if the soul
is to know itself
it must look
into a soul:*
-------------------
The companions died in turn,
with lowered eyes. Their oars
mark the place where they sleep on the shore.**
From the notes to the 1968 edition of Seferis’ Collected Poems, edited by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard:
*The quotation is from Plato, Alcibiades, 133 B.
**See Homer, Od. Xi. 75ff.,where the shade of Elpenor, youngest of Odysseus’ companions, asks that his oar be planted on his seashore grave to perpetuate his memory.
The colour is happening down our way again in places but with nothing like this intensity. That magenta against the mustard - brash and bellowing life.
ReplyDelete