From the Narrow Desert

The Man in the Moon

Went to the record store and bought

Bookends because it matched my mood

Still haven’t played it (I forgot)

Stayed out all night to pace and brood

Along the Olentangy River

Crescent waxing, just a sliver

Up in a pine tree in the park

Collected works of Yeats in hand

I sit and read till it is dark

How innocent -- just like I’d planned

Won’t someone take a photograph?

Crescent waxing, almost half

This lesson from the Maid I’ve learned:

The original, as published in Histoire d'une âme:

Aux premiers feux du matin,
Formant son riche butin,
On voit la petite abeille
Voltiger de fleur en fleur,
Visitant avec bonheur
Les corolles qu'elle éveille.

Ainsi, butinez l'amour:
Et revenez chaque jour,
Près de la crèche sacrée,
Offrir au divin Sauveur
Le miel de votre ferveur,
Petite abeille dorée!

My English version:

See the little insect which is
Gathering its daily riches
In the morning hour.
Joyful, it the petals waketh,
Enters and the honey taketh,
Flies to the next flow'r.

Be thou, too, a bold collector,
Taking love in place of nectar,
All that thou canst hold.
Gather thou of all that pleases,
Off'ring up the whole to Jesus,
Little bee of gold!

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,

That host with their banners at sunset were seen:

Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,

That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,

And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,

But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;

And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,

And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,

With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:

And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,

The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,

And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;

And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,

Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

Today marks the 590th anniversary of the murder of my patron saint, Jehanne of Domrémy. No body lies a-moldering in the grave -- she was burned at the stake and then cremated twice more to ensure nothing would be left of her -- but she lives today, a resurrected being, and her soul goes marching on.

They marched to the fire with a drum roll and battle-cries

They mobbed through the courtyard with passionate hate

They tied to the stake a soldier-maiden

And lighted the flames to purge heresy-taint

 

They shouted huzzah! as the pyre leapt upward

They tossed up their caps to the conquering flame

They toasted their mess-mates for burning a maiden

And ridding the earth of a scourge and a stain

 

They marched off in glory, content with their doing

They knew that a fire leaves nothing behind

They left her in cinders, and smoldering ashes

And wended their way with a bright, fearless mind

 

But they found, to their fury, she had somewhat escaped them

They knew not at first, but they finally learnt

Her heart was on fire with vision already

And fire is the one thing that cannot be burnt

Younger years, it seems, had more. It
pass'd more swift than those before it.
Still, I’d swear that more was in it
than a fraction of a minute.

Mary had three links of chain,

and on every link was Jesus' name

Unconquer'd Joan, O maiden brave,

To thee be this petition pray'd,

That we may see, through mist and dark,

Thy lily-spangl'd banner wave,

And, rising from the dust, be men!

That from thy flaming soul a spark

Ignite our hearts. O blessed Maid

Of Heaven, pray for us! Amen.

Bruce Charlton recently posted about Tolkien's unfinished poem "O! Wanderers in the shadowed land" and his own attempts at composing a suitable final line for it. (Did I resist the temptation to take a stab at it myself? Reader, I did not.)

The content of Tolkien's poem made me think of the beginning of Dante's Comedy, where Dante emerges from a dark wood and begins to climb a sunlit hill, only to be confronted by the three beasts, retreat, and take a minor detour through hell, purgatory, and the heavens.

Back in 2014, I "translated" some of this material (so loosely as to require the use of scare quotes) as an experiment. I was trying to duplicate some of the features of Dante's terza rima without the hard work of making each line rhyme with two others. I called the scheme I used "snake rhyme."

Both terza rima and my own rima serpentina have a chain-like structure which makes the poem as a whole indivisible. Each tercet in Dante or quatrain in my translation is linked by rhyme to the one before it and the one after it.

The trouble is that, as the diagram above makes clear, the first and last "links" in the chain are defective, smaller than the others. For example, the rima serpentina example above has the following rhyme structure:

aba cbdc edfe gfhg h

This defect can be solved by linking the A and H links, so that the chain becomes a circular one, the serpent an ouroboros, like so:

ahba cbdc edfe gfhg

Now it has a perfectly regular structure of quatrain "links" and is now, as I have said, circular. Once you reach the end, you go back to the beginning and recite it again; you can do this indefinitely, for as many repetitions as you like, and the whole thing will still be seamless.

So, I thought, what kind of poem would people want to repeat again and again indefinitely? Well, a mantra or prayer, obviously. Namo Amitabha, Hail Mary, that sort of thing. People who pray that way use a rosary, and a rosary is a circular "chain" of beads. In other words this sort of verse, which lends itself most naturally to writing repetitive prayers, also has the same structure as a rosary!

The Buddhist/Hindu/Sikh rosary has 108 beads -- a number which is conveniently divisible by four. So a perfectly "rosariform" poem would have 108 lines, constituting 27 quatrains of the form given above. The Catholic rosary has 59, a less convenient number.

I think this guy all of a sudden
could see time.
He can actually look into space and see
his movements from yesterday
and tomorrow.

When he tries to drink his coffee,
he picks up the one
from a couple of hours ago.

When he moves, time is shifted
in spontaneous ways so that there is no way to tell
the actual time.

His body and clothes are also
shifted throughout time, so his face
and pajamas are different when
he gets out of bed.

(source)

What I was looking for when I happened upon "The mosquito question" was Yes and No, a very long puppet show in verse. I didn't find it, so the best I can do is quote a few passages from memory.

The character No (Noah) is relating the story of the flood, presented as an undoing of the six days of creation. And just as the creation ends with God seeing that all he had created was good, the flood story begins

When God, surveying all he had
Created, saw that it was bad.

There follows a bit of (clever, allzuclever) pun-heavy badinage in which No's interlocutor questions how anything created by God could be bad, and then No gets back to his story.

I'll answer all in time. Now hark!
God spoke, and said, "Let there be dark!"
And dark clouds gathered in the sky
To hide earth's shame from him on high.
"The vault that keeps the seas below
And those above apart must go,"
Said God. The firmament was broken,
The seas set free as God had spoken.
"Let dry land disappear," said God.
"Let not a scrap of stone or sod
Remain above the surface, though
It top a mountain." It was so.
No fruit tree bearing fruit was seen,
Nor herb, for all that once was green
Was overwhelmed beneath the blue.
All living creatures perished too.
The lions, tigers, bears, and horses
All were turned to bloated corses.
The cattle and the creeping things,
The fowl as well, whose worn-out wings
Had not at last the strength to keep
Them safe above the rising deep --
In short, all things in which was breath
Succumbed to universal death.
And God's own image, which had crowned
His whole creation, also drowned.

Why was I thinking about this? Because Joan of Ark is, as the jokes have it, Noah's wife, and Noah is associated not only with the ark but with the arc (the rainbow, l'arc-en-ciel), and now with the dark (d'Arc) as well.

My post on the dark rainbow connected it with the crow. Noah released a raven from the ark (as noted in my original, pre-birdemic post on corvids). And when they made a Noah movie back in 2014, the titular patriarch was played by -- who else?

I wrote this ages ago and just found it while digging through some old papers looking for something else. I post it here for whatever it's worth, which is probably -- well, I'll let you decide.

Did no mosquitoes suck at Christ?
Was (once in them) his blood shed twice?
How many brave mosquitoes drank
At Jesus’ breast and back and flank?
How many brave mosquitoes died
With God’s atoning blood inside?
And, for that blasphemy they braved,
Are those mosquitoes damned –– or saved?

It's a bit self-referential, you see. The real question is, What say ye of someone whose whole approach to the divine is typified by the fact that he wrote something like this? Damned, or saved?

Not that I lose much sleep over such questions. As Chesterton once said (didn't he?), mosquitoes can fly because they can take themselves lightly.

"God appears, and God is light
to those poor souls who dwell in night,
but does a human form display
to those who dwell in realms of day."

These lines were penned by William Blake,
but others have a different take:
Stare long into the deepest black;
the human mind is winking back.

Whose perceptions can be trusted?
Those whose eyesight has adjusted.

"Rhyme burden" is a number indicating, on average, how many other feet each foot in a poem must rhyme with.

For example, in a Shakespearean sonnet, each line has five feet, and the final foot of each line rhymes with the final foot of one of the other lines. The other feet need not rhyme with anything. We can express this pattern as 0 0 0 0 1. Averaging those numbers gives us a rhyme burden of 1/5 (0.2) for this type of verse.

The terza rima of the Divine Comedy also has five feet per line, and only the final foot has to rhyme with anything. However, each line of terza rima must rhyme with two other lines (0 0 0 0 2), so its rhyme burden is 2/5 (0.4), twice that of a Shakespearean sonnet. As far as rhyme goes, writing terza rima is about twice as hard as writing a Shakespearean sonnet.

Even terza rima, though, is not nearly as hard to write as a good limerick. A limerick consists of 13 feet, the rhyme requirements of which are 0 0 2 0 0 2 0 1 0 1 0 0 2. Its rhyme burden, then, is 8/13 (about 0.615).

Here are the rhyme burden figures for various poetic forms, as well as for a handful of specific rhyme-dense poems. Lines which repeat previous lines (such as the final line of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening") are not included in the calculations.

• Blank verse: 0
• Ballad, fourteeners: 0.143
• Hexameter couplets: 0.167
• Pentameter couplets, Shakeseparean sonnet: 0.2
• Tetrameter couplets: 0.25
• Common meter: 0.286
• Trimeter couplets: 0.333
• Ottava rima (Don Juan): 0.35
• "Sweet Baby James": 0.357 
• Terza rima (Divine Comedy), "The Road Not Taken": 0.4
• Petrarchan sonnet (CDECDE sestet), Spenserian sonnet: 0.429
• Spenserian stanzas (Faerie Queene): 0.435
• Dimeter couplets: 0.5
• Petrarchan sonnet (CDCDCD sestet): 0.514
• "The Witch" (Yeats): 0.533
• "Leviathan": 0.6
• Limerick: 0.615
• "Litany Against Fear": 0.625
• "Fire and Ice": 0.667
• "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening": 0.7
• Monometer couplets ("We Real Cool"): 1
• Villanelle ("Do not go gentle into that good night"): 1.108

(The two linked poems are my own work, original in form but not in content. They are adaptations of existing poems to new, very complicated rhyme schemes, created as experiments to see whether such schemes were usable.)