Fragments in Defense of the Personal Poem

by Brett Rutherford

     After Callimachus, Aetia, i

Since those I call the “Telechines,"
(spiteful hammerers in bronze and brass
if I may summarize their style)
will give me no peace, attack me,
I feel compelled to notice them.
Those Cretans whose ignorance appalls
Athena, complain about my poetry,
as though they stood in line with Homer,
because I did not write one epic full
of battles and contentious gods, or lists
of all the ships and those who sent
and manned them, because I did not
catalog the single serpents
on the head of all three Gorgons
and give each one’s biography,
I am only a child to them,
scribbling with chalk my epigrams.

“Look, you’re getting on,” one tells me,
“and nothing to show but love throes
and temple hymns that reach an end
before a single cup of wine has cooled.”

And I say back: “Desist, you race
of expectant critics, all you who feed
on iambics and hexameters.
Long-winded goatherds around a fire,
beat-counters, foot-pounders,
your output is tin by the yard,
while I, in the space of two hands
gather fine gold at the cost of blood
in threads as thin as spiderwebs.

Oh, what my poems cost me!

 

 

2

Poems are sweeter when they are short.
An epic would cover a ball-field;
a lyric’s span is measured
in a two-hand count of heartbeats.

Fatten the offering, as Apollo says,
but only go home with the slender Muse.

The wide track where many chariots
pass from city to city may please
the armies, merchants, messengers,
but I who walk upon two legs
at leisure on my twisty trail,

for me the winding lane,
the path untrod, the den and lair
of the wild one —
here I will pause and write.
A clear spring’s water
and the fruit at hand
suffice me. At love, I contend

with no demons or demigods;
at war, my broken staff
is all but useless, so cease
to demand I sing of Sparta,
or Troy, or the rampant Persians.

Here with the cicadas
I hear no braying asses.
Age weighs me down.
If ever I had fire
like Enceladus, now
I sink beneath the piles
of rock and mountain
where Time entombs me.

No matter! I am content.
One modest Muse did not disdain
to walk with me when I was young.
Here in this lyric brevity
she still companions me.
Humbled and gray now, I persist.

And as for you, who harry me
for what I did not write,
there is a special punishment
the Muses reserve: your names
in footnotes, and nowhere else.