The Temptation of What’s Easy

Now I have grown into an age

In which to run a rhyme across a page

Is no more trouble than to lie awake

Scanning the night's silence for a quake

That in a distant land might kill

An infant conjured by my will.

Worst is, I fear the child is real.

It makes no difference what I feel.

Distraught, I imitate a poem by Yeats,

Hoping to pry open Morpheus' gates.

The fascination of what’s difficult,

He writes, has "dried the sap" out of his veins,

Shut in a stable by an ailing colt,

Whose sacred blood anoints its bolt.

What if—supposing all this—I read wrong?

Why, then, consult some other midnight’s psalm!

The Song of the No-See-Ums

Digital painting by Sukanto Debnath (Hyderabad, India, and Hungary, 2009)*

Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;

Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

The wretch, concentred all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,

Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung.

—Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel

“No-see-ums” are small biting flies

Not visible to careless eyes.

Their scientific name

is Ceratopogonidae.

So small, they nip and get away.

You’re itching for another day!

These punkies’ counterparts in brain

Are types of a deceiving strain.

The more ridiculous the tale,

They'll preach it to you without fail.

As creatures of fantastic lore,

They scarcely know what lies in store.

What they're taught by their mad master,

They gulp right down to void the faster.

Ignorance has been called a sin—

And so it is, deployed to win

By those whose end it is to harm,

By retailing a false alarm,

The polity from which they spring,

Buying into a con man's thing.

I’m sure you know now who I mean.

You met him in a nightmare dream.

*https://www.sukantodebnath.com/

October 11, 2024

Thomas Hardy at Wimborne Market

Wimborne Minster

"Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame,

That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill, . . .

Will you not grant to old affection's claim

The hand of friendship down Life's sunless hill?"

—Thomas Hardy, "She, to Him"

Let’s say I’m Tom Hardy

Come to Wimborne today

To tup a fair young ewe.

I think she’ll have me too,

Knowing I’m good that way.

Come hell, or high water,

She surely loves to play,

My randy todger’s prey!

In that next century but one,

Don’t you wish you were me, old son?

My novels will make me famous—

More yet than that famous Seamus!

And poetry and love that's free

Have here got equal rights in me.

Vide Matthew Bevis, "I prefer my mare,"

review of Thomas Hardy: Selected Writings, ed. Ralph Pite (Oxford); Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems, ed. David Bromwich (Yale); and Mark Ford, Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy and Poetry (Oxford). London Review of Books, October 2024, 46, no. 19, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/matthew-bevis/i-prefer-my-mare.

October 10, 2024