Unto This Last

Odysseus and the sirens. Attic red-figure stamnos from Vulci, 480–470 BCE, in the British Museum, illustrating the episode in the Odyssey 12.61–62, 212–36: "let every ear / Be stopp'd against the song! 'tis death to hear!" (trans. Pope)

A sonnet composed after watching Jane Campion's Keats biopic "Bright Star"

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, the adage

Whispered by an old inmate of our cage,

We listen to the song that's "death to hear";

Keats' nightingale is surely somewhere here,

Singing its little heart out! O bright star,

Unlike false Cortez to whose eyes, afar,

The ocean heaved into view "in Darien,"

We gaze, not on the Pacific, but men,

Whose leavings rehearse the sirens' voices,

Their easeful life disguising fatal choices.

Surely there is still time to fix the mess!

Can't we back up a bit and reassess?

This "nothing" might yet be Nirvana's shore—

We live again lost loves and banish war??

But no. You should have thought of that before!

That was the last of it. There's no fucking more!

Friday, January 2, 2026

All the Rage

But sad Ulysses, by himself apart,

Poured the big sorrows of his swelling heart;

All on the lonely shore he sate to weep,

And roll’d his eyes around the restless deep;

—Alexander Pope, The Odyssey of Homer, "The Departure of Ulysses from Calypso," 5.81–84

Fearing to squander genius on a wife,

Put to one side his "long disease, my life,”*

Aware expense of spirit would be steep,

Pope wrote poetry, thinking it might keep.

Like Odysseus on Calypso's isle,

He doubted wisdom had gone out of style.

What, then, fear I, in this enchanted den

I’ve dug to keep apart from other men?

They mean well—but confabulation reigns

In societies long contrived for gains.

It seems our species loves truth too little—

Freaked-out jots detest a weighty tittle!

While in the Siberia of its cage

Observed, the panther's pacing’s all the rage.

*Pope, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1735):

The Muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife,

To help me through this long disease, my life . . .

Dr Johnson called Pope's translation of the Iliad "certainly the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen . . . one of the great events in the annals of learning." But who reads Pope now (or Dr Johnson himself, for that matter)? My late friend Peter Green, in his own translations of Homer (which I copyedited for the University of California Press), dismissed "translators like [!] Pope" on grounds that "rhyming was unknown to Homer." Sic transit . . .

Jot: From the Latin iota, the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet.

Tittle: The dot over the letters “i” and “j,” from the Latin titulus, title or heading.

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

The Fate of Things

Res ipsa loquitur . . .

Everything that could be created has.

No, that's wrong! There's an infinity of things,

They crowd me close, each wretched dingus

Wanting an owner and respect,

To last until it's good and wrecked.

And who can say when that might be?

Like us they love eternity,

Old, crippled things, so hard to see.

Discarding them you must play rough

And dig them under, like the tough

Who ploughs the dough that buys the stuff.

I do my best to ward them off

Or hurl them from the light of day

To the Golgotha called “away,"

For it's impossible to find

(could be that the seeker’s blind).

Christmas Day, 2025