|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
So it's done. He has the wench. What now? This dare will win no friends in Greece If once the Greeks should learn That he with Sparta's queen has fled. He must be gone, and soon: Delay is death. In flight for Troy The journey east is fastest - But if by chance the maiming winds Should wreck his ship or break it on the shore Then any Greek to save him then would wolf him. Paris decides for the south: To plunge past Crete and dare Four days across horizons striding To the shores of Egypt. To plan is easy, but to succeed: First summon up the wind. But there is no wind. So Paris cries his men to oar, and so His ship with its forty jointless legs Crawls out upon the fish-infested sea. The sea which is crushed by the sun. The rowers sweat and strain. The wind Rumours in the sails, then cheats to nothing. Paris, idle but not at ease, Watches the hills recede, Hills still bulking high when a chariot Slews in a flurry of dust to the saltpan shore. A man leaps out, and shouts: His outrage turned to nonsense by the distance. He draws a weapon: hurls it. Light glints on plunging bronze Which sharps the sea with a flash: A sudden flash of fire, like the eagering spark Which sets a forest raging. Helen nuzzles Paris, seeks his hand And finds his grip - Though for a moment only - Strangely uncertain. |
|
|
Somewhere, Homer writes about a man who has been struck by a spear. The spear is still embedded in his body, and the spear shakes with the rhythm of the beating heart. This is war. And what reminded me of this? Well, today, I went hunting for some more old notes to build into my "how to write" project. But what I found, instead, was the ruins of my projected epic, "Troy," from which I extracted a small fragment, The Death of Patroclus, which I have added to my collection of online poems. What a mess! Looking through this old material, some of it as much as twenty years old - older, in fact, since this work on this epic got underway back in the 1980s - anway, looking through the material, it's plain that this is one project which has precious little chance of ever getting finished. A single word takes me back to quite a different time:- One of Ezra Pound's favorite words, I seem to remember. But I don't find it in the dictionary, so maybe I misremember, and the word is my own mutant invention. (Which is quite possible, since I went through a phase when I was commonly inventing as many as half a dozen words a day.) The gameplan for "Troy" was to write the story of the Trojan War, all the way from its causes through to its consequences, including details like the recruiting:-
|
|
read on |
|
|