Please forgive me for a second comment, but I wanted to make some remarks about the poem as a poem. It alludes, both in its title and in its text, to the pattern of a classic ghost story, the speaker haunted---but by the remnants of an emotion from personal history instead of a ghost in the traditional sense. And is the emotion that is doing the haunting a sum, a sum of several fragments (Eliot's statement, near the end of The Waste Land: "These fragments I have shored against my ruin.")? By making such an allusion, your poem---in my opinion---gives the grief and sorrow it expresses a universal resonance, a place in the canon. I am so very much impressed by this poem. I am sorry for my delay in commenting: I continue to be radically ill.
And, from a literary standpoint, you do not need to explain it otherwise---because I doubt (after reading in poetry for forty-nine years as of last month) that it could be stated more succinctly; and yet, in those four brief lines is an energy, just waiting to be released by expression, that turns the lines into four coiled springs. While brevity has never been one of my strengths, I recognize its presence in your work, and that you deploy it to the advantage of the poem. Which then becomes the advantage of the reader.
No one asked T. S. Eliot to explain the grief he expressed so forcefully in The Waste Land. No one, with any ability to appreciate classica music, wishes that any of Chopin's Nocturnes had been written differently. The enormous anguish described in Poet/Ambassador Paul Claudel's play, Parting At Noon, is---while almost unbearable to watch in a theatrical reenactment---not too short (as to be severely truncated, although some in the audience could wish it so), and not too long (as to be diffused among words and less effective).
Please forgive me for a
Please forgive me for a second comment, but I wanted to make some remarks about the poem as a poem. It alludes, both in its title and in its text, to the pattern of a classic ghost story, the speaker haunted---but by the remnants of an emotion from personal history instead of a ghost in the traditional sense. And is the emotion that is doing the haunting a sum, a sum of several fragments (Eliot's statement, near the end of The Waste Land: "These fragments I have shored against my ruin.")? By making such an allusion, your poem---in my opinion---gives the grief and sorrow it expresses a universal resonance, a place in the canon. I am so very much impressed by this poem. I am sorry for my delay in commenting: I continue to be radically ill.
Starward
And, from a literary
And, from a literary standpoint, you do not need to explain it otherwise---because I doubt (after reading in poetry for forty-nine years as of last month) that it could be stated more succinctly; and yet, in those four brief lines is an energy, just waiting to be released by expression, that turns the lines into four coiled springs. While brevity has never been one of my strengths, I recognize its presence in your work, and that you deploy it to the advantage of the poem. Which then becomes the advantage of the reader.
No one asked T. S. Eliot to explain the grief he expressed so forcefully in The Waste Land. No one, with any ability to appreciate classica music, wishes that any of Chopin's Nocturnes had been written differently. The enormous anguish described in Poet/Ambassador Paul Claudel's play, Parting At Noon, is---while almost unbearable to watch in a theatrical reenactment---not too short (as to be severely truncated, although some in the audience could wish it so), and not too long (as to be diffused among words and less effective).
Starward