ALTER EGOThe boy from Uplyme with his smile
Who stands on cliff-tops staring down:
One stares as well. The sea is barren.
And the beach. But still he stares.
Branches of sloe and bullace
Cloud his dark, his idiot eyes.
Always he wears the vacant smile
Of happy mongoloids and kings.
One day he turned and spoke to me.
I'm John, he said. I like it here.
--John Fowles
As boy, I thought myself a clever fellow
Inishboffin on a Sunday morning.
Sunlight, turfsmoke, seagulls, boatslip, diesel.
One by one we were being handed down
Into a boat that dipped and shilly-shallied
Scaresomely every time. We sat tight
On short cross-benches, in nervous twos and threes,
Obedient, newly close, nobody speaking
Except the boatman, as the gunwales sank
And seemed they might ship water any minute.
The sea was very calm but even so,
When the engine kicked and our ferryman
Swayed for balance, reaching for the tiller,
I panicked at the shiftiness and heft
Of the craft itself. What guaranteed us--
That quick response and buoyancy and swim--
Kept me in agony. All the time
As we went sailing evenly across
The deep, still, seeable-down-into water,
It was as if I looked from another boat
Sailing through air, far up, and could see
How riskily we fared into the morning,
And loved in vain our bare, bowed, numbered heads.
--Seamus Heaney, from "Seeing Things"
As boy, I thought myself a clever fellowAnd wished that others held the same opinion;
They took it up when my days grew more mellow,
And other minds acknowledged my dominion.
Now my sere fancy 'falls into the yellow
Leaf', and imagination droops her pinion;
And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk
Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.
And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep,
'Tis that our nature cannot always bring
Itself to apathy, for we must steep
Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe's spring,
Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep.
Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx;
A mortal mother would on Lethe fix.
--Lord Byron, from the fourth Canto of his Don Juan
Mateo: sculpture mix; selective denim glazing; scarf. Summer 2011.
The poetry was selected in the usual fashion, intuitively, as an unlikely set of verses that still seemed to fit together somehow. Or, the poetry was chosen by fitness, for contrast, and as proxy or emulation. I've referred to Heaney's anxieties while afloat here, and I'll repeat that I do not share such nervousness. I admire his writing, and Fowles', and Byron's, of course.
