Acedia

Kenneth Branagh as Macbeth

Your courage borne from nothing left to lose,

What life is this, without an heir, wife dead?

And as you seemed to wonder, noble ruse,

Your executioner’s sword flung your head.

No pain.  Or one to end all tortured breath,

Brief candle, he, your towering enemy.

You thought it strange that he should look on death

As though it meant defeat.  Some irony.

Acedia, for Macbeth © Ron Villejo

Tess Durbeyfield

Nastassja Kinski as Tess

At early dawn, one moment lost in youth,

Still to become the maiden she won’t be,

How even then Tess knew in reverie

Her star was blighted.  Rendered into truth,

The ill-judged execution of the plan

Did misappropriate the finer such:

Assurance, none in time of doubt; and much

Love, if it truly were, from the wrong man. 

Where was her guardian Angel, who would come

But to ungently judge as wrong the wronged?

From Marlott she began, to Stonehenge will

She bear the last injustice from the sum.

It is as it should be, Tess thought, and longed

For death to raise her name to d’Urberville. 

Tess Durbeyfield © Ron Villejo

I loved reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the 1892 novel by Thomas Hardy, as a student at Northwestern University. Tess was as much a tragic heroine, as was Desdemona, and I found her story seeping emotionally into my poetry in those youthful years. This is a Petrarchan sonnet, and my diction is a bit stilted at times, but it still has quite a lot of sentimental value for me.

 

Lament for Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Dear Eleonora meanders

Across the vast expanse

Of his tragic musings,

Mixing with the sound of surf

And the eloquence of his

Hallucination, bizarrerie of which

She is simply unaware.

Only the words echo magically

As youth in love is prone

To hear them, not really

Understanding at all.

Poe might have imagined

The beatings, foreshadowing

What has been foreshadowed before –

The final consumption into nightmare,

Pain and release from pain,

How the art ultimately imitates,

As it must, the life

It haunts so intimately. 

Where is that enclosure now?

This shrinking square of red light

Suggests it was never really there.

We do not see it.

But he who has lived and

Died in it know only too well

The sudden burst of illumination

Like insight before everything diminishes

And falls into the throes of darkness. 

Lament for Poe © Ron Villejo

I saw a dramatic portrayal of Edgar Allan Poe on stage, and was drawn deeply into his macabre world.  This shrinking square of red light was how the play ended and how horrifically his life must've ended.  In September 1980 I wrote this poem.