“watch the sun rise / running in the shadows / damn your love damn your lies”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday:

“Her strong enchantments failing,” A.E. Housman

Her strong enchantments failing,
    Her towers of fear in wreck,
Her limbecks dried of poisons
    And the knife at her neck,

The Queen of air and darkness
    Begins to shrill and cry,
“O young man, O my slayer,
    To-morrow you shall die.”

O Queen of air and darkness,
    I think ’tis truth you say,
And I shall die to-morrow;
    But you will die to-day.


My favorite Housman poem not from A Shropshire Lad, and a strikingly compact harness of myth to deal with private demons. As a gauge of just how deep Housman’s mythopoesis could run, this is where the title Queen of Air and Darkness was coined—it really isn’t old lore.

---L.

Subject quote from The Chain, Fleetwood Mac.

Comments

[asakiyume]

This is just great. Thank you!

[larryhammer]

Innit? Amazing compression and power.

[cmcmck]

One of my favourites too!

[larryhammer]

Yes, but yuo have taste.

[mme_n_b]

My favorite! I love how the accent in the last line of the first stanza is different from the second and third.

[larryhammer]

And from the rest of the first stanza -- he's making sure that knife really stands out.

[swan_tower]

Was just copying this one into my notebook of Poems What I Like, and it struck me: very unusually, this is one where I can see exactly how I would tweak it. Two small changes at the end, nothing more. First, "And I shall die" to "That I shall die," and second, turn the semicolon at the end of that line to an em-dash.

I think that might be the first time I've looked at a published (and somewhat classic) poem that I really like and thought, "yes, but I think it would have been a titch stronger if."

[larryhammer]

I agree with the dash -- punctuation usage has shifted since Housman was a lad. I'm not sure I agree with And > That, though, which shifts the emphasis, making it one assertion instead of two, and removes the pivot-balance of and/but. If anything, I'd like to remove the comma after "say."

[swan_tower]

I agree with the dash -- punctuation usage has shifted since Housman was a lad.

Let's get some Dickinson up in here! :-D

I'm not sure I agree with And > That, though, which shifts the emphasis, making it one assertion instead of two, and removes the pivot-balance of and/but.

I see the balance there, but the leading "And" feels weak to me. Chaining the penultimate line a little more closely to the one before, to my eye, increases the contrast and impact of the final one, rather than having them trail out piecemeal.

But, y'know. It ain't like Al didn't know his own business. If even one of my poems achieves half the immortality of his, that will be a real achievement!

(By the way, copying poems into that notebook is the main reason you sometimes get such belated comments for me. I open these posts in a tab until I have the time and attention to write them up . . . which is occasionally months later.)