A pounding beat to drug, enhance, enfold –
iambics are the dance floor of the old.
*****
Published in The Asses of Parnassus, home of “short, witty, formal poems”. Thanks, Brooke Clark!
Illustration: ‘Iambics’ by RHL and ChatGPT
Jasmina is the doorway, Jasmina is the key;
Jasmina walks the path beside the pearl-infested sea.
The angels peer bewildered from the god-infested sky;
Jasmina is the only how that doesn’t need a why.
I see her in the morning in her robe of melting frost;
She visits me at noontime when the meaning has been lost.
At evening she invades the nooks the spiders thought their own
Till night demands a moon; she stoops, and hurls it like a stone.
I used to think her complicated, now I know she’s not
(A how that doesn’t need a why has little use for what).
I used to think she’d care for me, if only for a while;
I used to think a lot of things before I saw her smile.
I never hear her speaking though I think she has a song
Which many claim to know although they always get it wrong.
She feels like furry gossamer and tastes like perfumed smoke;
I often hear her laughter but I never learn the joke.
Jasmina is a destiny, Jasmina is a doom;
Jasmina is a woman but with stars within her womb.
The demons peer demented from their hope-infested hell
And beg her for a story, but she hasn’t one to tell.
*****
Simon MacCulloch writes: “Jasmina is a slightly offbeat take on the great western goddess motif (Aphrodite, the Virgin Mary etc). It is not based on anyone I know.”
Simon MacCulloch lives in London and contributes poetry to a variety of print and online publications, including Reach Poetry, View from Atlantis, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Spectral Realms, Black Petals and others. Jasmina was originally published in Blue Unicorn.
Photo: “mask” by new 1lluminati is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where, in the sun’s hot eye,
With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall.
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labor fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast.
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them,
Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.
I’m very grateful to my schooling for putting Matthew Arnold on the curriculum – this subversive little passage seems designed to undermine the office and factory culture which has flourished since his time, to undermine even the student writing endless essays. Arnold was an inspector of schools as well as a poet and social critic, so we can assume he knew what he was doing. But isn’t it suggesting that a dissatisfied person should just drop out? More on that in the next fragment.
The other thing I like about the piece is its easy, flowing style. Every line rhymes, but without pattern. The lines are iambic, mostly pentameter, but a scattering of them are shorter. It feels very conversational, and it is certainly very easy to learn by heart (which is one of the reasons that poetry evolved in the first place). The only hiccup to natural speech are the displacement of ‘live’ and ‘give’ to the ends of their lines for the sake of the rhyme and even that, though artificial, is done conventionally enough to read smoothly. The rest of it is in normal speech. When T.S. Eliot came out with ‘Prufrock’ some decades later, though it had a different, Imagist sensibility, the only real difference in style was in dropping the thou’s and thee’s that Arnold still clung to.
Photo: “Office workers in Executive Building Room No. 123 prior to alterations, Brisbane” by Queensland State Archives is marked with CC PDM 1.0
Form in Formless Times 