More Enchantment
Moments in the Flow…Some words about Poetry and Recording the Rest of Chapter One
Hello again,
I realized this morning that it’s not just because January has consisted of many cold, cloudy, gray days that I am disinclined to engage with the world. It’s because we are still on the brink…the plunge into the truly new year that may bring me out of the doldrums will begin when Neptune enters Aries on the 26th, Uranus goes direct on February 3rd, Saturn enters Aries on the 13th and the Ring of Fire Solar Eclipse at 28 Aquarius arrives on the Chinese New Year of the Fire Horse. It’s quite an energetic line up.
In the meantime, Poetry is a theme coming up everywhere I look right now, and I am moved to enter my opinion on this. There’s a reason it’s popping up, and this the buildup to what is coming in early February…the cross-quarter Festival of Imbolc (the Irish word for it) that marks the beginning of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. This is presided over the great Mother Goddess Brigid. Keeper of the Cauldron in this Irish mythology, her realm includes healing, fire, metallurgy and poetry.
Our modern society may wonder why poetry is a Goddess attribute (as it is for the Welsh Cauldron Keeper, Ceridwen). But the true poem is not born from a carefully detailed, analytical experience, or current fashion, but a creation inspired from the Otherworld…coming through the Flaming Door beyond the personality to be a tribute and a lesson. (I describe the way of the Bard in Part Two of my series on Ceridwen.) But the Priestesses were poets, too. In Book One*, Anwen writes a poem as part of her early lessons. Another Priestess in the Circle of Nine on the Priestess Isle plays the harp and sings her poems.
Why They Rhyme
Songwriters still lean into rhyming, but modern poets don’t seem to be focused that way. But many, if not most, of my poems rhyme. There are different poetic forms of rhyming, and I’ve employed a lot of them. The words may be the end of a line or skip a line or more to appear. There is also internal rhyming, which came up in the poem I wrote about the death of Edgar Allen Poe. Within the line creates a driving, wavelike, ‘Poe-like’ rhythm. And this poem came in waves over two days. None of this was consciously chosen, just appeared. It was inspired by seeing this description of him quoted in a newspaper obituary.
“A bright but unsteady light has been awfully quenched.”
J.P. Kennedy
(on the death of Edgar Allan Poe, October 10, 1849)
“Candles melting, waxen pools, staining parchment’s
creamy white. Flickering figures, phantom jewels, forged
in his soul’s bright, unsteady light. A midnight bird,
bold on the door frame, mocking, shocking,
with a single word, unlocking dark despair that dreary
night; that night like hundreds more before it, filled
with yearning, filled with fright. Who else held dear
would death remove from sight, taken in a brief year’s
turning? Might some burning courage soon awake, shake
raving ravens from the door; claiming life, lament no more?
Instead in waking dreams came words like roiling deep sea
spirals curling on an ancient shore, or rising boiling mists
in cold stone hallways, seeking always, swirling through
sad chambers life had fled. Thoughts, a whirling vaporous
vortex, climbing toward a shred of light, increasing, bright
in eyes, on lips whose love’s sole meaning ceased his suffering,
eased his plight. It was lost; a moment, fleeting, cost him dearly,
clearly took the will to fight. What demon held his broken
lamp on last damp, dusty travels; caused the still mistakenly
unraveled awful quenching, dressed down, like a tramp?
No tintinnabulating bells would tell the world to mourn
unsteady but bright light. A candle briefly glowing, gone.”
Rhyming drives the opening of the Bardic Rhiannon’s Dance:
“Alone in my garden on Midsummer’s Eve
That night of moon-magic with quicksilver ease
I cast off forever the subtle, sweet, supplicant
Mask of my bondage to seek my release.”
This poem has a fluctuating rhyme pattern. I have read this at performance poem events many times. The rhyming encourages memory and the form takes on regularity when Rhiannon sings her song. (This quickly found a proper Celtic melody.) And I feel it had this effect in the days of Goddesses and Festivals. You would remember a long rhyming Bard’s poem as you remembered the rhyming songs of the seasons--as we remember Christmas Carols.
My rhyming Bardic poems arrived when I lived in Florida. Not long after moving to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I was invited to a monthly poetry group and that was when, over the years, a hundred or more poems of all types were written, and some published. We would study a poet and find examples of his work to share, and a few of us would write a poem in their style or an idea suggested by the group leader. That’s why the Poe poem was written. I shifted back to writing when my Poetry Muse ‘went on vacation’ as I became the ‘advocate’ for the last years of my father’s life.
Wherever she went, she must have liked it because, so far, she hasn’t come back. (I also left the poetry group, which motivated writing a poem a month.) I went back to writing Anwen’s life story with a short detour to write The Greatest Enchantment. Then I came back again to finish what became the Revealing the Druid Legacy trilogy. Now, here I am on Substack. People have asked for more in the Druid tale and I feel there is a prequel but so far the time is not right. I’ve learned to trust in divine timing.
And now it’s time to read what I can of the rest of Chapter One, The Land That Had No Fall. Some creatures make sounds which I will try to deliver. For those who would like to see my non-rhyming poem about the disappearing Muse, I have added it below.
See you next time! And please feel free to share/restack and I welcome comments. Tapping the heart at top or bottom of the post is also appreciated.
✨💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨💜✨
You’ll no doubt see how different a non-rhyming poem can be:
My Muse Went on Vacation
When she saw my father’s face
my Muse went on vacation.
Not up to watching me tackle
the undoing of a lifetime,
she withheld her thoughts,
while I could only catch
glimpses of her--lounging beneath
a swaying palm tree, sipping
vodka tonics to numb the heat,
disappearing in a cloud of
pervasive humidity. I work.
She waits. Inspired ideas, clever
phrases, rhymes headed
for a page, neatly filed away
in climate-controlled storage.