THE WINGS OF ICARUS

THE WINGS OF ICARUS

BY

HUGH C. GRIFFITH

HAWTHORNE BOOKS * COLUMBIA MARYLAND

Copyright 2016 by Richard A. Griffith

All Rights Reserved

Published by Hawthorne Books

Columbia, Maryland

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical No part may either be photocopied or recorded by information storage or retrieval system, without permission of the publisher

Hugh C. Griffith

Dedicated to C.S. Lewis, Russell Kirk, and all the others who helped me to understand the Spirit

CONTENTS

Introduction

THE ANIMA IMAGE

Love’s Trinity

The Nut-Brown Maiden

A Love Song

Despair

Song for the Tribe of Eve

The Prisoner

For a Christian Girl

The Earthbound Lover

For Ann

For Jennifer

Thoughts on Scenes from Keats

The Tournament

The Ancient City

Perdita

Joy’s Widow

Options

In Memoriam

Meditation for My Mother

Grief

Dialogue of a Father and His Daughter

THE RELIGIOUS IMPULSE

Saint Francis

Thanatos

The Debate

INTRODUCTION

The mystery of the sources of a poet’s creativity produces never-ending discussions and critical essays. Is the poet a magician? Is he an alchemist? May his inspiration be likened to that of the Biblical prophet? No one knows, but the poet may be compared to the alchemist, and a truly fine poem to the gold the alchemist sought to produce from baser metals. But the poet’s alembic is not a crucible. There is no mixture of metals, salts, and acids, no philosopher’s stone. The poet’s alembic is what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, the racial inheritance. Into that vessel are poured all the experiences of the poet’s life, including his dreams and fantasies, and when the moment of inspiration comes, the past experiences rise re-formed by their mixture with the archetypal figures that represent mankind’s inherited disposition. The sense of awe which the reader or listener feels when he first encounters the finished poem is like the feeling experienced when a truth, a certainty, suddenly emerges after long periods of study. It is his own truth, a Socratic truth, a truth he always felt but could not express, and that truth sounds the chord of that “basestring of humility,” the secret of man’s common disposition, for which the young Prince Hal sacrificed his reputation and the affection of his father. The poetic discovery becomes, through the poem, an individual, personal truth. The sense of wonder comes from the reader’s recognition that the mystery of the poem is as much his as it is the poet’s. In addition to the mystery of the purely creative process, there is a second mystery. Just how is the poet able to share the union of thought and emotion with the reader? Just how does he translate this emanation of the self into the common language? The answer is that a priest called Craftsmanship blesses the union with the rites of the poet’s craft, and the most important rite is the rite of rhythm. The poet who is a craftsman knows that the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables is as important to a poem as time signature isto a musical composition. His knowledge ranges from the various poetic forms to the rhetorical devices and includes the knowledge of the various emotional effects of the sounds of the consonants and vowels that form the words of his poem. Consider A.E. Housman’s,

“With Rue My Heart is Laden”:

With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid,

The rose lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where flowers fade.

This poem, seemingly short and simple, allows the reader to hear in a new way the common chord of man’s mortality. Melancholy and wistful acceptance color an observation common to us all, and if we look for sources of the feeling the stanza produces, we notice the smoothness of the iambic line, the addition of anapests in lines three and four, and the feminine rhyme employed in lines one and three.Just as important is the use of the liquid consonants, the m’s, l’s, and r’s. We notice also the alliteration and the evocation of nature’s cycle in the image, of the rose-lipt maiden, and if the word “golden” brings to mind Shakespeare’s lines “Golden girls and lads all must/like chimney sweeps come to dust,” man’s one inescapable tragic fact, death, echoes in the mysterious regions of the heart.The final stanza repeats the craftsmanship of the first, but the sense of regret or sorrow (rue) is diminished by the missing anapests and the stronger end rhyme of laid and fade. Resignation now mingles with sorrow, and the reader is satisfied emotionally. The wonderful fact about this poem is that the reader, without knowledge of the craft, responds to the feelings of his heart because the response is built into the craft and emanates by itself from it, and that is the magic of poetry. In the publishing business we often hear the complaint “Where are the poet’s gone?” Our answer to that question is this volume of poetry. The poets have not gone. Hawthorne Books offers to the poetry lover a craftsman who does strike that “base-string of humility” in its extended sense as the base chord of humanity. In this volume are many poems that will bring the reader pleasure and a deeper perception of another mystery, the mystery of mankind’s emotional nature. In this volume each reader will also find some poems that will be especially his, poems that he will treasure. It is the purpose of Hawthorne Books to provide the reader with what he misses most, books of true literary merit. This volume of poetry is the first step.

The Editors