Darkness Deposed
January 15th 2009 18:31
That time of night when you might behold
a slit of light, gray and cold, slowly
opening the east, the dawn is told
to break the dark that clasps the world
softly.
You might just want to shut your eyes while
fingers of light grip the night and rake
off layers of velvet that beguile
the heart to think it cannot take
dawn’s smile.
Oceans of orange and arrows of red
drip from darkness’ dawn-inflicted wound,
washing the land in light that bled
through slashes in shadows damned
and doomed.
Don’t close your eyes, but open them wide;
this tide of piercing clearness—blinding
vision— rising sun will deftly divide
dark from light. It reaches inside,
reminding
of shadow and flame juxtaposed
of old in our souls. Don’t you want this?
the light of dawn filling that abyss,
a searing pain, darkness deposed
by bliss
that’s brought by the sight of the light,
sight outside of the specter
of night? Do you still want to fight?
Just let go in submission
to this
divine ignition.
The short 1-2 word connectors are actually supposed to be located on the right side of the poem instead of the left...when I post it, they automatically justify to the left. Rather annoying.
This poem is about sunrise superficially, but I think it pretty obviously goes a lot deeper than that. The duality of darkness and light has always been something that fascinated me as a poet and a thinker. I enjoy trying to take archetypal themes like this and bring a new perspective to it. I've written a lot of other poems about darkness and light, and shadows, and cold, exploring everyday minutia involving these things and somehow attempting to tie these thoughts in with deep worldview questions and values.
I used meter and rhyme and alliteration in this poem, but other than that it has a form of its own. I'm not sure I ever, or am able to, write other poems in this exact form. In its first incarnation I tried to have a consistent syllabic limitation per line, but after writing it like that, it sounded wooden and stilted, so I cropped and pruned it to be what it is now. From this experience I've come to believe that it's only wise to give yourself syllabic parameters if you're working with traditional forms, or trying to play off of a traditional form. For something like this, that has a unique shape of its own, it's better to just let the words flow.
Of course I still have all my lines have a similar pattern, like the short connecting stumps all have around two or three syllables, and the longer lines are usually somewhere from seven to ten syllables. I didn't really plan it this way; it just fell in after I cropped out unnecessary words, and switched out some odd-sounding words for more euphonious synonyms and switched the syntax around in some places to sound more natural. I got rid of the first version a while ago, otherwise I would post it for comparison.
This poem is a good example of an important aspect of my personal poetics; that is, that written poetry has two distinct and important structural dimensions: aural and visual. Putting abstract ideas aside, the way the words and punctuation fit together produce certain sounds when read aloud or mentally (aural aspect), and the way it's arranged on the page slightly affects the aural aspect, but it really gives a poem almost an entirely different level of meaning.
For example, I could have all the same words and punctuation, arranged (grammatically) in the same way, but have it in prose, block-text form, or in neat little Shakespearean quatrains. I don't believe the poem would have the same feel if that were the case. I don't consider this to be a discussion of 'concrete' poetry, since usually concrete poems' text takes on a specific shape. I suppose what I'm thinking of would be more aptly termed 'visual rhetoric.' The way the words are arranged on the page couples with the sounds the poem produces to create a twisty candy cane of art and thought.
I'll speak more about this at another time. Tomorrow I'll talk about poetry before the time of rhyme and sonnets. Believe it or not, the highly structured, end-rhyming, iambic pentameter poetry was only really popular starting a few hundred years ago...for millenia before that, and hundreds of years later (modern day) people wrote much different poetry. But I'll talk about that tomorrow. Have a nice day, everyone!
a slit of light, gray and cold, slowly
opening the east, the dawn is told
to break the dark that clasps the world
softly.
You might just want to shut your eyes while
fingers of light grip the night and rake
off layers of velvet that beguile
the heart to think it cannot take
dawn’s smile.
Oceans of orange and arrows of red
drip from darkness’ dawn-inflicted wound,
washing the land in light that bled
through slashes in shadows damned
and doomed.
Don’t close your eyes, but open them wide;
vision— rising sun will deftly divide
dark from light. It reaches inside,
reminding
of shadow and flame juxtaposed
of old in our souls. Don’t you want this?
the light of dawn filling that abyss,
a searing pain, darkness deposed
by bliss
that’s brought by the sight of the light,
sight outside of the specter
of night? Do you still want to fight?
Just let go in submission
to this
divine ignition.
The short 1-2 word connectors are actually supposed to be located on the right side of the poem instead of the left...when I post it, they automatically justify to the left. Rather annoying.
This poem is about sunrise superficially, but I think it pretty obviously goes a lot deeper than that. The duality of darkness and light has always been something that fascinated me as a poet and a thinker. I enjoy trying to take archetypal themes like this and bring a new perspective to it. I've written a lot of other poems about darkness and light, and shadows, and cold, exploring everyday minutia involving these things and somehow attempting to tie these thoughts in with deep worldview questions and values.
I used meter and rhyme and alliteration in this poem, but other than that it has a form of its own. I'm not sure I ever, or am able to, write other poems in this exact form. In its first incarnation I tried to have a consistent syllabic limitation per line, but after writing it like that, it sounded wooden and stilted, so I cropped and pruned it to be what it is now. From this experience I've come to believe that it's only wise to give yourself syllabic parameters if you're working with traditional forms, or trying to play off of a traditional form. For something like this, that has a unique shape of its own, it's better to just let the words flow.
Of course I still have all my lines have a similar pattern, like the short connecting stumps all have around two or three syllables, and the longer lines are usually somewhere from seven to ten syllables. I didn't really plan it this way; it just fell in after I cropped out unnecessary words, and switched out some odd-sounding words for more euphonious synonyms and switched the syntax around in some places to sound more natural. I got rid of the first version a while ago, otherwise I would post it for comparison.
This poem is a good example of an important aspect of my personal poetics; that is, that written poetry has two distinct and important structural dimensions: aural and visual. Putting abstract ideas aside, the way the words and punctuation fit together produce certain sounds when read aloud or mentally (aural aspect), and the way it's arranged on the page slightly affects the aural aspect, but it really gives a poem almost an entirely different level of meaning.
For example, I could have all the same words and punctuation, arranged (grammatically) in the same way, but have it in prose, block-text form, or in neat little Shakespearean quatrains. I don't believe the poem would have the same feel if that were the case. I don't consider this to be a discussion of 'concrete' poetry, since usually concrete poems' text takes on a specific shape. I suppose what I'm thinking of would be more aptly termed 'visual rhetoric.' The way the words are arranged on the page couples with the sounds the poem produces to create a twisty candy cane of art and thought.
I'll speak more about this at another time. Tomorrow I'll talk about poetry before the time of rhyme and sonnets. Believe it or not, the highly structured, end-rhyming, iambic pentameter poetry was only really popular starting a few hundred years ago...for millenia before that, and hundreds of years later (modern day) people wrote much different poetry. But I'll talk about that tomorrow. Have a nice day, everyone!
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