WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
by Jacob Jordaens (1593 - 1678)
According to Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus was ten years away at the Trojan War, then futher delayed by an additional ten years of misadventures, the last seven or eight of which were spent with the nymph Calypso, on the island of Ogygia.
Odysseus remained enchanted by the singing and perpetual weaving of Calypso -- a touching parallel to his wife Penelope who was tirelessly weaving -- and unweaving -- while awaiting his return. Eventually Calypso relented and helped Odysseus build the boat (depicted above by Jordaens) that would take him back to his wife on the Island of Ithaca.
In this heart - breaking poem by Archibald MacLeish, Odysseus bids Calypso farewell and explains the rationale for his departure and his choice:
Calypso's Island
I know very well, goddess, she is not beautiful
As you are: could not be. She is a woman,
Mortal, subject to the chances: duty of
Childbed, sorrow that changes cheeks, the tomb --
For unlike you she will grow gray, grow older,
Gray and older, sleep in that small room.
She is not beautiful as you, O golden!
You are immortal and will never change
And can make me immortal also, fold
Your garment round me, make me whole and strange
As those who live forever, not the while
That we live; keep me from those dogging dangers --
Ships and the wars -- in this green, far-off island,
Silent of all but sea's eternal sound
Or sea - pine's when the lull of surf is silent.
Goddess, I know how excellent this ground,
What charmed contentment of the removed heart
The bees make in the lavender where pounding
Surf sounds far off and the bird that darts
Darts through its own eternity of light,
Motionless in motion, and the startled
Hare is startled into stone, the fly
Forever golden in the flickering glance
Of leafy sunlight that still holds it. I
Know you, goddess, and your caves that answer
Ocean's confused voices with a voice:
Your poplars where the storms are turned to dances;
Arms where the heart is turned. You give the choice
To hold forever what forever passes,
To hide from what will pass, forever. Moist,
Moist are your well - stones, goddess, cool your grasses!
And she -- she is a woman with that fault
Of change that will be death in her at last!
Nevertheless I long for the cold, salt,
Restless, contending sea and for the island
Where the grass dies and the seasons alter:
Where that one wears the sunlight for a while.”
Archibald MacLeish (1892 - 1982)
by Sir William Russell Flint (1880 - 1969)
Anne Sexton makes no allusion to The Odyssey, yet her words in this poem could just as easily spring from the resigned heart of Calypso as from a stoic modern heroine. She understands the rationale, the choice, "the call":
For My Lover, Returning To His Wife
She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favourite aggies.
She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.
Let's face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.
She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,
has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter's wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,
done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.
She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.
I give you back your heart.
I give you permission —
for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound —
for the burying of her small red wound alive —
for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother's knee, for the stockings,
for the garter belt, for the call —
the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.
She is so naked and singular.
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.
As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.
Anne Sexton (1928 - 1974)
Odysseus And Calypso (1929)
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, March 28th
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