POETS Day!: Algernon Swinburne and the Ties that Bind

Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday – the mantra of self-determination and healthy balance in life. Ideally, we would follow the example of the Coatekola who thrived on a series of islands littered up and down the coast of South America. I don’t know if it was religious or philosophic but the ethos among those people was that for every length of time you work, you play and every length of time you play you work. There are versions I’ve read that say “for every hour” instead of “for every length” but I suspect that the concept of an hour was stamped on them by a European translator.

It sounds ideal, but we can’t do that. Not in the times we live in with the advantages we take for granted. We need crops and nail treatments and subscriptions to Teen Vogue. Are you fully living if your car can’t Bluetooth with your refrigerator to tell you about the dangerously low level remaining in the organic coconut milk bottle?

What about the kids? How will they learn to play baseball without the summer camps and sports psychiatry sessions?

The modern world cost money, and though the example of the Coatekola and their magnificent equilibrium is beautiful to behold, it is impractical if you want all the new shiny stuff. You need to toil. Besides, I just made them up. They never existed.

What can be gleaned from this false lifestyle of these illusory people is that though their philosophy is a less than structured figment of my imagination, we occasionally need to escape the arrangement we have made with the brave new world and reclaim a short period from the grind. This is the mission of POETS Day.

Let’s get you out of work.

There are perceived dangerous animals that really aren’t that bad. Racoons are notorious for carrying rabies but possums have a natural immunity probably because of low body temperature, or maybe it’s the other way around. Do your due diligence. Squirrels will work.

A boa constrictor might be a bit expensive but if you have a field guide to snakes and are pretty sure you can tell if the one you trapped in the back yard is not a copperhead, there’s promise there. Be careful.

You can’t do bats. The Office already did that if you get caught people will think you were being derivative. Be original.

I think you are safest with non-raptor birds. I’d go starlings, plural.

The plan is to release the beast or slithering menace or beautiful songbirds that swarm in the trees over your car and shower it in white droppings and release them in your workplace around two thirty. The resulting chaos should have you and your coworkers gathered en masse in the parking lot by two forty-five and you get to leave by three.

If you are risk averse you may want to call in a few false animal control emergencies to various companies to reduce availability and make sure that no Johnny on the spot shows up and quickly takes care of the issue.

Do yourself a favor and leave something – a brief case or tennis racket – that you might seem to need over the weekend in your office. You don’t want to look like you had foreknowledge.

Now you’re out. There’s baseball on the bar TV (television) and Jeopardy on your phone, but take a moment and read this week’s poem.

This week’s featuree is Algernon Charles Swinburne. I first came across his work in high school but he was a minor figure in a course on English literature. I later made his acquaintance in Mark Hodder’s novel The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack where a fictionalized Swinburne played a Robin-like character to a fictionalized Richard Francis Burton’s Batman-like one in an amazing time travel adventure mystery.

Hodder portrayed his fictional Swinburne as a devote of the Marquis de Sade and a raging alcoholic but if you look into the history of the actual man you’d find that he was a devote of the Marquis de Sade and a raging alcoholic.

He was eventually cured of all that, but the further he inched toward the straight and narrow the less interesting his verse became.

I’ll trust you to decide where this week’s poem, Love Lies Bleeding, falls in his timeline from debauched toward sanctified. It’s going to be hard to see a bruise again and not think about stately purple plumes.

With no further ado.

Love Lies Bleeding

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

Love lies bleeding in the bed whereover
Roses lean with smiling mouths or pleading:
Earth lies laughing where the sun’s dart clove her:
Love lies bleeding.

Stately shine his purple plumes, exceeding
Pride of princes: nor shall maid or lover
Find on earth a fairer sign worth heading.

Yet may love, sore wounded scarce recover
Strength and spirit again, with life receding:
Hope and joy, wing-winged, about him hover:
Love lies bleeding.

The poem referenced in the following quote from Norton’s Anthology of English Literature is not the one above, but I love this line:

“As Arnold Bennett said of Anactoria, Swinburne played a rare trick on England by ‘enshrining in the topmost heights of its literature a lovely poem that cannot be discussed.'”

Have a great weekend.