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.

Nicole's Love Song

(image credit)

On an elbow, chin on palm,

I recall how desolate

What seemed that perpetual

Zürich dusk, odd silhouette

Of bare trees against the sky

For the isolated eye.

Evening was not quite the calm

Where some dreaded fear became

Definite once and for all

That the introverted can

Cling to with maternal grace.

Silence had a sound at lame

Lonely moments, moments when

It was chatter come like odd

Comfort, at times willowy

Whispering like douce ennui,

Sweet loss of all touch and care –

Till returning back to face

Myself as myself, despair

That could only turn to God.

Nicole's Love Song © Ron Villejo

I read three of F Scott Fitzgerald's mere handful of novels, and Tender is the Night stood out for me.  It was an autobiography of sorts: Fitzgerald in the rising psychoanalyst Dick Diver, and wife Zelda in the troubled Nicole.  The trochaic meter and rhyme scheme are modeled after those of WH Auden.  I began to write it in April 1982 and finished it a year later. 

Puck

Randall Duk Kim, as Puck, in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Puck am I, and only that,

Shameless, light and mischievous,

I whose antic air no one

Seeks beyond the comic age

Which I parody on stage.

There is nothing serious,

Yet I feel the sudden hush

After everyone has left.

None but I can hear my own

Hollow laughter echo through

Mock reality and doubt.

Then a melancholic rush

Overwhelms the figure who

By his self-indulgence made

Gaiety a wreckless state.

Truths incline to irony,

And I exit now without

Any love or company.

Puck, after WH Auden © Ron Villejo

More than 30 years ago now, I traveled to the American's Player Theater in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and feasted on Shakespeare in the wooded outdoors over two or three summers.  One of my best memories was the performance of Randall Duk Kim as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  That was summer of 1980, and in November that year I wrote my poem.  There must've been something in that APT production that prompted me to write a darker, melancholic Puck.  Or maybe it was just my mood at the time, but my poetry professor Mary Kinzie at Northwestern University loved the poem.  It was this poem that she said Auden had a liberating effect on me.