Hack away its stinging tail;
Hack away its horns;
Face the corpse whose copper locks
Are tangled up with worms.
If your stream* could scream at you,
I know that it would say,
“You have a circle and a sword
To keep vampyres* at bay”.
You have more than most other men;
Fate armed you, like The Laird Of Changue*;
Sip some peat scented whiskey;
Put away the laudanum.
Hack a new cleft in its foot;
Hack its bat like wings away;
She was never Beatrice;
She was Liz and she decays.
------------------------------------------
*Dante Gabriel Rossetti = Artist/Poet who
convalesced at Penkill Castle (Which is near to Changue) where he attempted suicide.
*stream = At Penkill Castle he also wrote the poem
'The Stream's Secret'
*vampyres = Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the nephew
of John Polidori, the physician of Byron and author of "The Vampyre".
*The Laird Of Changue= A scottish folktale about a
Laird and bootlegger who fought the Devil and won, cutting off parts of the Devil's anatomy with a sword.
Comments
skinner_jennifer | June 23, 2011 - 15:41
Hi well-wisher,
a very interesting perspective.
Jenny.
Highhat | June 23, 2011 - 17:20
This is quite profound and I think you have used some symbolism, am I right? It reads like a man who is near his wits end= the suicide attempt. I loved the Scottish references and I really didn't know that Dante had lived there.An educational poem. Thank you
atb
;)Pia
well-wisher | June 23, 2011 - 17:32
Thankyou, Jenny and Pia. I'm really glad that you liked it.
The poem is essentially the voice of a
person (perhaps my own voice) shouting
at Dante Rossetti,"Don't give up! Your a
gifted artist, why commit suicide? Face up
to your demons!".
As soon as I discovered the folktale
about the "Laird of Changue", I was
immediately attracted to it because it
was the polar opposite of the 'Faust'
legend. Instead of losing his soul, the
Laird of Changue fights the devil and
wins.