[ilds] Persian Ladies

[william godshalk]

A lovely poem. Perhaps the poem is self-contained, not a field of 
references to history, unless the history is imaged rather than 
lived. I'm more interested in the meaning imbedded in the poem 
itself. Why does the mind recoil as from a branding-iron?

Bill

 >A PERSIAN LADY
> >
> >Some diplomatic mission---no such thing as 'fate' ---
> >Brought her to the city that ripening spring.
> >She was much pointed out---a Lady-in-Waiting---
> >To some Persian noble; well, and here she was
> >Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance.
> >By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches,
> >By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels.
> >
> >He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty,
> >The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron:
> >The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes;
> >How would one say 'to enflame' in her tongue,
> >He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty?
> >When their eyes met he felt dis-figured
> >It would have been simple---three paces apart!
> >
> >Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go,
> >The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes
> >Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory.
> >Next day he deliberately left the musical city
> >To join a boring water-party on the lake.
> >Telling himself 'Say what you like about it,
> >I have been spared very much in this business.'
> >
> >He meant, I think, that never should he now
> >Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow
> >Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires,
> >The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke,
> >Grey temple, long slide into fat.
> >
> >On the other hand neither would she build him sons
> >Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry
> >Which was the fashion of his time and ours.
> >She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact
> >Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins
> >In a biography the year of birth and death.
> >
> >1964/ 1961
>
>
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W. L. Godshalk		*
Department of English         *
University of Cincinnati            Stellar disorder  *
Cincinnati OH 45221-0069      *
513-281-5927
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