In The Scarlet Letter and the Odyssey,
characters navigate a charmed élan—
in sails and monograms, a nimble hand.
A persuasive pedigree of libertine
and vagrant makes allowances
for imagined heat—to look upon the sun
as upon an arbitrary thing, and live, within
a luminous parallel of bronze blades
and embroidery.
But art, for all its sensual geometry,
cannot compete with life: the test
not blank verse at The Globe, but rough crowds
at the interval, betting
cup-and-ball games in the pit.
§
Baudelaire honed hysteria
the way a botanist cultivates a plant—persuasive
as a wildling hollyhock, or reeds bent like widows
in the wind.
For priests and poets, honour, for
anyone else, the whip—he thought Progress,
steam-whistle factories and Paris riveted
to its ghosts, a plot by bankers and Belgians.
He stood on the shore, attaching
to the sea a physical majesty, a convention
of waves in infinite repetition, imagining a refuge
from ennui—instead, the legacy of Ahab.
Come hither, broken-hearted; here
is another life....
§
Melville presented the Pequod
as the dark side of the moon, and drove
its airless psyche against the wind.
Whale oil barrels leak untended
where the crew invests in Ahab’s OCD
and ship’s boats launch against the Primal.
Mad or mesmerised, they disregard
their Captain’s prophecy, that his fate
is for a rope-tailed spear and sea grave.
Of all, Starbuck alone calls on the Lord—
in his boat, only men who fear the Whale,
defiant through fathoms of despair.
Ishmael alone—the difference between
a requiem and a reef of bones.
§
Faust and Peer Gynt, both sociable,
but only to a point—they know heroes
are two-a-penny, unless a line
is set in sand, the sand set
in an hourglass, and the glass then
polished until a face shines back.
Parameters are fixed, but only
for pupils and admirers—on Facebook
they block their oldest Friends
until someone pleads, What have we done?—
the oxygen of attention the sweeter
for the threat of vacuum.
Their ancestors in attics—neurotic
bloodlines, more Hamlet than homoerotic.
§
Kierkegaard addresses hatred
for existence as willing misery on the Self,
as though despair was a vocation
to be whittled into pocket keepsakes.
Quixote, that arbiter of quest themes,
convinces himself his calling
is to save the world—his ignorance of it
the irony, played out against a windmill.
You may not know all the words,
but to recognise the Mystery suggests
you shuffle towards repentance with
something more than shopping vouchers.
Besides, like Childe Harold in the bath,
or Presbyterians, you can always hum along.
Estill Pollock | Runaways
Contents | Mudlark No. 74 (2023)