Ars poetica: "A Confession" (twofer)

[primeideal]

Another poem coming by way of someone I don't think of, foremost, as a poet. As well as writing the Narnia novels and various apologetics, C.S. Lewis also wrote science fiction and poetry. "A Confession" features an allusion to one of the poems I struggled with in the high school classes I've discussed before, which made me very glad to run into it.

My version follows below. Although the structure of stanzas (and line count) has changed, it's a letter-by-letter anagram of Lewis' original. Working with this constraint means I started at the beginning but also worked backwards from the end to make sure I had a strong finish before running out of letters. Then I stitched them together in the middle. Maybe you can spot the point where I was like "ffff, I have too many ffffs to get rid offff." ;)

I am so coarse, the things the poets see

Are obstinately invisible to me.

For twenty years I've stared my level best

To see if evening–any evening–would suggest

A patient etherized upon a table;

In vain. I simply wasn't able.

To me each evening looked far more

Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore

Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind

Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.

 

Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east

Never, for me, resembled in the least

A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker's nose;

Waterfalls don't remind me of torn underclothes,

Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I've never known

The moon look like a hump-backed crone–

Rather, a prodigy, even now

Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops' brow

Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place

I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.

 

Never the white sun of the wintriest day

Struck me as un crachat d'estaminet.

I'm like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom

A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom

Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,

Compelled to live on stock responses,

Making the poor best that I can

Of dull things…peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran

Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,

The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.

*

Although I write often and pass among

Poets, perhaps they do not know I'm young.

I'm nineteen (my birthday will be in June).

If we were both to contemplate the moon,

I'd be unlikely to see anything more

Than craters which we could have seen before

We looked afar through ornate telescopes.

I'll take a place alongside other dopes.

 

Lambs look like lambs to me. They have no higher

Meaning. The sun: a mere warm orb, like fire.

And dawn: colored stripes, clouded over or hazy.

Perhaps my imagination's lazy.

I don't know whether I'd like to see

Whatever came to others, learnedly.

Whether you believe Christ was really God or doubt him

Not all glum writing's really about him.

 

Heavenward glances don't ever represent

God's call to an antagonist ("Repent!")

Wardrobes never were Narnian gates,

Few weaving women arcane female Fates.

To unpack an old writer's reference

Or allusion's not my real preference.

I'm baffled, didn't get stuff, have conceded

All I narrate's chaff, not needed.

 

Leaves which float down rivers have never been

Viking vessels. No one has shown me when

A wolf was a devil. And I don't speak

French, so my poetic street cred's weak.

So though it could spark modernist complaints

I think that I will stick with old constraints.

Limericks, sonnets, other things with iambs,

Acrostics, forms I've made up, anagrams.