Bedside Reading

I think I had Byron's Don Juan in my hand.

The Bull From The Sea

Passages: Boland's "Daphne" and Mythic Art

Mythic literature--I've always loved it, from the translations of the Greek, Roman, and Germanic classics to the retellings and adaptations by contemporary writers. And, by mythic literature, I don't just mean the sorts of things Robert Graves or Mary Renault have done with Classical figures and beliefs, but also the sorts of things Charles de Lint or Robert Holdstock have done with Celtic, Indo-European, Amerindian, and other figures and beliefs.

Poetry is rife with mythic borrowings and mythic intonations from the earliest days. I almost wrote "from the days of belief," but who says belief doesn't exist now, exist in ways that matter most, figuratively, metamorphically (and that's not a misspelling for "metaphorically"). Right now, I'm thinking of Gluck's "Gretel in Darkness" (folklore counting as mythic, to me); Yeats' "Leda and the Swan"; Kizer's "Hera, Hung From the Sky"; Graves' "Ulysses"; and H.D.'s Helen in Egypt.

I could--and will--quote half a hundred good poems that use mythic material, but here's the first, the one that held me fast today when I was just reading around, open-eyed, not a care in the world, for that half hour I try to devote to the practice each day. Dangerous habit, that reading around, that openness; I recommend it.

Here's Eavan Boland and her poignant contemporary take on the myth of Daphne, a mortal woman transformed into a tree to escape the lust of the pursuing god Apollo.

DAPHNE WITH HER THIGHS IN BARK

I have written this

so that,

in the next myth,

my sister will be wiser.

Let her learn from me:

the opposite of passion

is not virtue

but routine.

Look at me.

I can be cooking,

making coffee,

scrubbing wood, perhaps,

and back it comes:

the crystalline, the otherwhere,

the wood

where I was

when he began the chase.

And how I ran from him!

Pan-thighed,

satyr-faced he was.

The trees reached out to me.

I silvered and

I quivered. I shook out

my foil of quick leaves.

He snouted past.

What a fool I was!

I shall be here forever,

setting out the tea,

among the coppers and the branching alloys and

the tin shine of this kitchen;

laying saucers on the pine table.

Save face, sister.

Fall. Stumble.

Rut with him.

His rough heat will keep you warm and

you will be better off than me,

with your memories

down the garden,

at the start of March,

unable to keep your eyes

off the chestnut tree—

just the way

it thrusts and hardens.

--Eavan Boland

An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987. W. W. Norton @ Co. New York & London: 1996.

Touchstone: The Testament of Daedalus

Consider this quotation from Michael Ayrton's The Testament of Daedalus:

What there is in me of poesis rests in my fingertips and in my eyes, but because the poem exists in the thing I make, and not in me, it comes to me in the act of discovery. I make votives of one sort and another and celebrate possibilities in gold and bronze and other materials. In the making of things and especially in the making of images, lies an act of conquest which is sufficient exercise of power for a proper man.

I put this passage next to Seamus Heaney's "The Diviner" (and next to various parts of Mary Renault's The King Must Die and The Mask of Apollo) when I think about teaching, about art, about craft, and about ambition. The books I haven't written yet; the stories I tell, have told, will tell.

Ayrton, Michael. The Testament of Daedalus. London: Robin Clark, 1991.

Renault, Mary.  The King Must Die.  New York: Pocket Books, 1965.

---.  The Mask of Apollo.   New York: Pantheon, 1966.