Text Version Here*:
Memory, O Memory, Mistress of Misadventure
Mass that moves the firmament of my mind
Mnemocentric monarch, Madam Maker, my demise
Petrifying paramour, you’ve panged me till this point
Painfully pulling, or with pleasant palms persuading
Down paths that preach of penance for the pitiful
Deceptively pricking poison in the purity of a child
No longer can I act attritious amour, a vulnerable veneer
Veiling vaults of vexing vermin fettered, infested in my chest
No longer can you suffocate my senses- Enamored in another world, feeding phantom flesh
My moth-eaten mouth murmurs ‘O Maria,’ as bog and body moldering matrimony make
No longer can I trust our trysts- entrancing, encumbering, in ecstasy
When you whisper weary words, do you sweetly sing in sooth?
Or nourish my neurosis, a meaningless mirage of words
Unspoken, still unwoke, ensnared in sticky webs of nonsolution?
Nought but convolution, Night, and Chaos to be known?
Fabricated memory, wearisome woven woe
Could it be you that plagues me so?
Madly, Memory molts, meanders, justly joined with drowsy Dream
Distorted by delusion, tested, tarnished, teased by Time
Poetic pretense preoccupies.
Endlessly engrossed, indulge internal, enigmatic elocutions
Detail days gone by, now worn by neck; Bygone days, beguiling, binding
Sick synapsis soldered, swearing Sisyphean servitude
Yet tear away, traitorous, to the self that terror seized?
To the whelp that wore the wounds and swore so self-assured
Ushered into impossible pact, preserving partial pictures
Grievance engraved in limbic limbo, fingers tracing tenderly, trusting in a time
When Fate frees the moral mouth of Justice, justly blind?
For blindly, boldly I burdened myself, marveling her maze of malaise
In pillow talk I pledged perpetual peonage, but sorrowful servitude I cannot sustain
For want of waning Memory, or deliverance from debates raised in ritualistic righteousness
A cuckoo court where witnesses vaunt my voice, the sole cerebral sound
To tear the psyche’s scaffolding for quests, questioning faint fables for farce
Never quenching any query or desire
Desire for Truth diminishes, yet the truth becomes plain
Too long I’ve wasted, withering, softly suckling breast barren
Sweetly sliding into Dream and Memory as they feast on my foul form
And though engorged, in envy are insatiable, for sanguine sacrifice yields no spirit substance
I conceived us codependent consorts, yet now perceive precocial parasite
Convincing me to cock my neck, a fair but fruitless bite
Memory, my Memory, amorphous paramour
Dear distorted distillation of labyrinthine lore
Lover, please forgive me, for I carry no contempt
Yet cannot tell where you begin and Imagination ends
I conjure your existence, you tell me who I am
Farewell most precious Memory, farewell deluded dance
This blog post will discuss a bit about a poem I wrote, inspired by the MA curriculum. When writing the poem, I tried using poetic devices that stuck out to me during the year. I used alliteration heavily, inspired mostly by Old English poetry, but alliteration is of course not exclusive to the period. We are, after all, reading The Alliterative Morte Arthure in Middle English this week. I tried to use the caesura, as well, another common feature in OE poetry, however in OE, the caesura is on every line. It was not my goal to reproduce a strict poetic style or structure, but to be loosely inspired by poetic features across many different periods. I have not stuck to a regular meter, some lines being in iambic tetrameter, hexameter, or heptameter. I have employed iambic pentameter quite minimimally, actually, but when I have used it I have tried to do so creatively, in a way that points to the form. For example, I tried to juxtapose it against other meters in the third stanza:
‘No longer can I act attritious amour, a vulnerable veneer
Veiling vaults of vexing vermin fettered, infested in my chest
No longer can you suffocate my senses- Enamored in another world, feeding phantom flesh…’
I wrote these lines (imperfectly) as follows:
5 iambs- caesura- 3 iambs
5 trochees- caesura- 3 iambs
5 iambs- caesura- 7 iambs
I wanted to play with the meter here and elsewhere by creating a rhythm impacted not only by poetic feet but also modified by assonance, enjambment, and by linking words together to complete a rhyme or alliteration to enforce a forward moment such as ‘vermin fettered, infest’ or in the next stanza ‘…words / Unspoken, still unwoke, ensared…’ I debated the latter due the grammatical awkwardness of ‘unwoke’ but the rhythm of it delighted me too much.
Other times I wanted to affect a slowing down in the rhythm, for instance at the end of third stanza the forward momentum is slowed by ‘O Maria‘ and further slowed by a triple amphibrach: ‘entrancing, encumbering, in ecstasy’ (albeit with an odd unstressed syllable at the end, the effect remains). I considered following the example of Renaissance authors such as Shakespeare who note contracted syllables with an apostrophe in order to fit meter, wherein I would write ‘encumbering’ as ‘encumb’ring’ or ‘moldering’ as ‘mold’ring,’ etc., however I decided against it in fear of defamiliarization or maybe cold feet. I’m still feeling ambivalent on that call.
Finally, the content of the poem is inspired by the technique of personifying abstract concepts and speaking to them. This is a common technique, whether in the beginning with the ‘invocation of the muse’ or by encountering the ‘person’ within the narrative. For example, Troilus and Criseyde begins each book with the invocation of a different muse; Paradise Lost begins with the invocation of the spirit that inspired Moses, later invokes the concept of light, and personifies Sin, Death, and Chaos within the narrative. Virtues and vices or concepts such as Fate are often the subject of this personification. I chose to write a sort of love letter or goodbye letter to the concept of Memory, not predicting that I will have Alzheimers, but rather letting go of the fruitless quest of trying to discern memory from dream or imagination. I chose to present it romantically to express the bittersweet feeling of letting go of something that you cherish because it does you harm, placing myself in a metaphorically ‘toxic relationship’ while also invoking the Middle English romance convention of the lover’s complaint (again, something that appears elsewhere, too). It’s a personal topic, though I’ve refrained from anything too confessional. It was not my goal to recount the memories, but to portray how they have preoccupied me and caused me needless suffering in trying to find some sort of ultimate ‘truth,’ because there isn’t one, and there never will be, and I must sit in that discomfort.
*Unfortunately, I am having persistent problems with images becoming blurry when I upload them, but I really wanted to present my poem in a way that not only formally, but visually would evoke my inspirations. I wanted to give a nod to our Histories of the Book module by displaying my poem as if it were in a medieval manuscript. I was inspired by the fonts, rubrics, and illuminations as a way of presenting poetry accompanied by visual artistry, as well. I think it is a lovely way to show care and appreciation for the words written on the page, a way of giving them one last courtesy when all the edits have been made. Of course, my Google image search could never be as painstaking as the process of careful illumination performed by medieval scribes, but I express my appreciation in this rudimentary emulation.
Picture: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mnemosyne, 1875-81, oil on canvas. Accessed via Wikipedia.