the back burner

What? I never did resonate with your poetry. Actually, it makes me feel kind of stupid...another good reason we broke up. :)

It's getting better, though, my poetry idiocy...can you explain to literal-minded me what direction I should start thinking so that I think correctly about your poem?

Oh. Yeah, this one was a mite confusing.

It's really a thinking poem. I wrote it to help me think about Turandot, an opera I heard for the first time on the radio just the other day. I came home and discovered I had one of the arias on a "Famous Opera" compilation cd. It was Nessun Dorma (no one sleeps, in Italian).

So the poem is mostly just stolen ideas from the opera, where the cold but beautiful Queen Turandot asks suitors three riddles. The mythopoetic "law" says that if they answer correctly, they marry Turandot. If not, they die. Caleph (sp?) is the first person EVER to answer all three riddles correctly, but Turandot cannot bring herself to marry. Out of love, the Unknown Prince Caleph offers his own proposition: guess my name by morning, and I will accept death at your hands.

But Puccini used some interesting ideas that I want to understand: night and dawn imagery, the nearly archetypal pattern of the sun god conquering the moon goddess, the older literary understanding of love as a kind of death, the triumph of love over all other powers, the role of the man as persuer.... I just typed peruser, which is very different. I should go to bed. See you and the new BF soon. Drive safely!!

Hey, thanks for the explanation. It was good. and here's some insight: The sun god conquers the moon goddess, but then she comes out again the next night, sligtly different, and the sun god must attack her differently in order to conquer her the next morning. Each is vanquished by the other, but in different ways. Which is in the ascendant? Look outside? Which is better? More powerful? Each, and neither. that was a foolish questions.

Also...love and death is in "Till We Have Faces" quite a bit. Psyche sees her marriage to the God of the Mountain as a kind of death. "The death of virginity, of my maidenhead," she says. And Romeo and Juliet talks about it too, in scene i. of act I. Sampson and Gregory are badmouthing the Montagues, and they talk about cutting off the maidenhead in a roundabout way. (That conversations sparkles!)

And, I have more insight into the poem. I did before I read your explanation. Because in the dark night of the soul, our Groom Jesus sings to us to comfort us and soothe us...a kind of lullaby.

And you might want to explain your death allusion in the last couple lines. It comes out of the blue and it sounds scary not humbling, as marriage/death is.

I like your poem. I see the death lines at the end as either the man or the woman dying to him/her self--something that must be done when one loves.

Reminds me of John Donne--intricate and deep. I like it; it's thought provoking.

Well, you're both right. Love is a kind of death, not least because that is the kind of love Jesus had for us. All our love springs, whether we know it or not, from the simple fact that we were first loved. Every love is either a shadow or echo of this great big love at the axis of history.

The woman will either receive the love of the singer (and die unto some sort of new life) or she will ultimately lose her ability to love at all (and die unto a living death). But now I'm just being allegorical. And drawing dangerous parrellels between human love and divine love. There's still a connection or resonance here, though. I just wrote the poem to help me figure it out.

But the poem asks new questions which are confusing in and of themselves. Sigh.