Emptiness, the cancer of too much thinking,
settles like a poisonous slumber, cloying
sourness of the graven and grave. My only
thoughts are of nothing.
Dead men, words and name in eternal memory,
loom like God Himself in my head, far distant.
I can never equal their sainted actions
writ in the heavens.
Step into the air, feel the wind and thunder
rage against you. Rage in return, and know then:
they are dead, and you still can taste the sunlight,
screaming out I AM!
for Esmé, of course
Background
This is a poem I wrote after a conversation with one of my friends. I don't tend to like the poems where I'm deciding or explaining what I think that much, but this one isn't too bad. It's also the first poem I wrote at uni.
Technically
This is a trio of Sapphic stanzas, usually just called Sapphics. Sappho was a Greek poetess from the island of Lesbos (she occasionally wrote poems praising female beauty, hence the terms Sapphic and lesbian) who either invented or popularised the stanza, which goes like this:
Tróchee, tróchee, dáctyl and twó more tróchees
Sáme twice móre, you knów where you áre with wríting
Sápphics: Threé of thése ones and thén the fínal
Clósing Adónic.
(Apologies for the awfulness of that. It served a purpose...)
(If you didn't see the hexameter post, a troche goes LONG-short (like its name), and a dactyl goes LONG-short-short (its name in Greek was dáktylos, which does go like that), and there are some other ones which aren't as necessary here.)
You might also remember the Adonic, which I promised to bring up here again. As well as being in the final line of a Sapphic (though originally the sense and often the word itself would spill over from the previous line), the Adonic is at the heart of each of the three longer lines:
So the goddess fled from her place, with awful
Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her;
While behind a clamour of singing women
Severed the twilight.
Like in hexameter, it propels the line forward invisibly, like an engine.
But look at that last line again:
... it propéls the line fórward ...
It's not just found in verse. If you start listening out for it, you'll hear people often tálk in Adónics, and a lot of prose (like speeches) which are claimed to have "good rhythm" often use thís kind of páttern to talk in.
Another rhythmic tic is the choriamb (Greek for "trochee iamb", which is the same as an Adonic but without the last short syllable - sómething like thís. It comes up in the King James Bible a fair bit (if you hear it read that sort of thing comes out noticeably - haven't got any cóncrete exámples here).
Generally, metre is everywhere. I'll probably do a post about this at some point.
Links
The title is a pitiful reference to "For Esmé - With Love And Squalor" by J. D. Salinger.
The Sapphic is from the Wikipedia page, apparently by Algernon Charles Swinburne.
