Put simply, the form consists of nine lines - eight in iambic pentameter, with a final line of iambic hexameter - and a rhyme scheme of ABABBCBCC, which actually works rather better than its complexity suggests it might. The real irritant is in fact the line of hexameter, which I have always found a particularly graceless beast. Strangely, though, iambic heptameter can work brilliantly, perhaps because it seems to naturally dissolve into two phrases rather than one enormous one. Pope was famously critical of hexametric - or alexandrine - lines, writing that:
'A needless alexandrine ends the song
That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.'
But enough arcane nonsense - the aim of poetry should be to free us of such factitious boundaries. This is the first poem of my own writing which I've added to the blog - I hate to stoop to the worst kind of nepotism, which is of course nepotism unto oneself. It is doubly selfish - somehow invoking charity and self-service simultaneously. Perhaps I will add more poems, but it will only be in the knowledge that nobody reads this blog regardless.
I regret to say that no narrative will be found in the writing below. This does not grieve me too keenly - all narrative is illusion: a kebab of individual events pierced with the skewer of human vanity. It is in some way dismissive of the reader to provide a narrative. The reader should either construct his own narrative or deem such a construct beneath his intellect.
*
I
Black monsters stalked the earth and stole the stars -
They cleaved a sky that scarcely could contain
The anguish of the world - a sea of scars
Which bled imagined agony as rain,
A deathly venom, that it could retain
Its decomposing empire, for those who die
Die in unfavourable framing, all in vain
Is life to him whom life gives no reply -
How foul the world when friendlier seems Eternity!
II
And first they'll take the breath from out your dreams,
The sustenance which lends on life its wit,
By cruel gradation, till this planet seems
A mechanism for destruction; it
Welcomes only the obedient ones who fit,
Without resistance, in its sterile mould
And leaves the rest to rankle in a pit
Alien to passion's grace, where chains of gold
Ensnare with lies the human heart which would be bold.
III
And then they'll take your mind, you're made to feel
That love is mortal sickness, that distrust
And animosity are much more real -
That lenity and kindness surely must
Be aberrations in nature's disgust,
Things that avail us naught; if we embrace
It is to gain mere favour; if we lust
We graft the mask of love upon its face -
Impunity of hatred! Man knows no disgrace!
IV
And last they'll take your heart, they'll cut it out
With scrutiny's cold scalpel, not to kill
But to defame, to build a black redoubt
Within the breast, immune to beauty's trill,
A rock which recognises only ill
And smiles on misery, thinks how to sell
Some potion of abatement, some foul pill
To keep man in despair, or to impel
Him to an occupation he deems living hell.
V
When spring returns, and flowers of tincture bloom -
Roseate, purpureal, multifarious hues
In fields of mounting elegance, scarce room
For observation's glare, where to find use
Is but to kill, is grossly to abuse,
The man of modern times will bring device,
He'll clutch his iron breast and he will choose
To sell whate'er he can, to put a price
On myth, and all the while convert it to a vice.
VI
The pangs which cleave this heart cannot divide
My soul from those of idiots - those who crush,
With brittle laughs and smiles, that which would hide
For fear of seeming strange; this heart would blush
And face the hordes unarmed sooner than gush
With its unbounded power - I have been blind
In mortal life to spheres beaming and lush,
Free and benign, such as dwell in my mind -
And where I'm trapped I have not found one of my kind.
VII
A view of life which, if resigned, is full,
And self-aware, unwilling to bring harm
Where'er its bearing falls, which would annul
Gross malice with a brand of fierce alarm,
Disgust for feeble tyrants who would charm
With nonsenses the men on whom they tread;
An ideology with hopes to arm
Mankind against deception - in his head
'Tis better that the bud of love should bloom instead.
VIII
And know that in this world 'tis those who have
That realise their purpose - who by power
Extraneous to their own can hope to save
Their souls from that great force which would devour
With an unfeeling vice - they tend a flower
Planted by someone else, centuries ago,
In harsh injustice, at a dismal hour,
When conquerors forged currency from woe
And tyrants tore from hands the scraps they would bestow.
IX
Little has changed, but now we work for shades,
Inconstant despots with no throne to claim,
Composed of greed, spanning perhaps decades,
Passed on as some fell virus which would maim
All hope of savour in this world - with shame
We chase material goods, as if they held
Some truth beyond themselves, and in this game
There are no winners, everything is felled
And lost - by silent spectres to the grave impelled.
X
'Just one more hour, just one more thing to ask,
This one last chore and freedom will be yours,'
A spirit speaks, and all take to the task,
No thought for that utopia which implores
To reason - that is silenced by the claws
Of an unwinding monster which defends
This world from beauty. Fields of hellebores
Begird the soul of him whose thrall extends -
And though it's ending every day, it never ends.
XI
Authority is poison - we would take
The virtue of the world and tread it down
For individual greed and gain - we make,
When crushing fellow men, a world unknown
To Death's domain, for even Death would own
That all men are born equal, and in Death
There is at least equality - we're mown
In equal strikes, each man must sink beneath -
Where rich and poor, in common woe, give up their breath.
XII
How foul a world when men must go to die
To gain what this our life could not provide -
An uncorrupted fairness: those who lie
In fields beneath, 'tis they who have espied
A shallow glimpse of justice; as they died
They must have wept to know that parity grows
Precisely where it cannot be applied -
Then disobey, and heap disdain on those
Who would enslave us, seize the world that they oppose!
XIII
And of their pain nobody would dare speak
For someone's always worse off, someone's died
Or lost an arm to bandits, or made weak
By some unpleasant illness - we elide
The choicest anguish of the heart to hide
From gross comparison, which might declare
Our own be trifling hardship, we must bide
And nurture our negation till a bare
And soulless creature stumbles out of its despair.
XIV
Thus, like the hydra, many-headed woe
Broods in each heart and chains it to its tune,
It blights us with its monody - we know
But dare not speak of that which must lie strewn
'Midst everything we look on, and the boon
Of ignorance is such a fragile thing
Which plagues us here and there, and as the moon
Casts but a dim reflection of a being
Far greater than itself, so it would hide its sting.
XV
Then treat me as a churl, a serf, a knave -
I have descended from the spring of life
And found the fountain brackish, and could save
No fragment of attention for the rife
Contenders for our interests, but with strife
Have put each hope to rest that we could gain
Something to fill the void which, like a knife,
Cleaves this heart into shards - I think again
On how we are as slaves who cannot break the chain.
XVI
Reality, that common thing we feel
Yet cannot understand, then set to work
To found all reason on it - would we reel
If we could view the spectres which must lurk
Beyond the veil of life, the which we shirk
Not for dispassion but for want of power,
Which, as a host of angels made berserk
With lashing fire and lightning, would devour
Philosophy in one embrace, and kill the hour.
XVII
Is madness knowledge? He who views the world
In all its morbid hues, is he not wise?
It is as though the universe unfurled
Its terrible laws and man sought to devise
A contract with no hint of compromise,
Then took to his dull life without a thought
Toward the spectral bars which would comprise
The boundaries of his senses, such that naught
Of care for life's in him that he's not gone and bought.
XVIII
I have been mad at times, when massy gates
Which guard each heart from cauterising flame
And deathly knowledge (whose mere glance creates
A sense of desolation naught can tame)
Have felt themselves riven by reason's aim,
Crushed with a ghastly malady of spirit
Akin to horror, dread or mortal shame,
Such that the fire of life raged, and to hear it
Bred the most monstrous fear, which no man should inherit.
XIX
It eats into itself as some strange beacon
Which burns only that it might burn anew,
And fire is painful to behold - we weaken
In its corrosive glare, yet know how few
Have sat at its black monstrance - all that's true
Is there to witness, but the gates are hard,
Colossal shields of the most sable hue
Whose surfaces most will not even regard -
Perhaps they are the wise, those who remain unmarred.
