The Warning of Solon the Athenian

I woke up this morning and was seized by the desire to make a new English adaptation of one of the great verse admonitions of all time, attributed to Solon the Athenian, the great king and law-maker. This is based on Demosthenes, "On the Embassy," in which the orator recites from memory these lines by Solon. His warning about civil strife and its costs, and his admonition in favor of wisdom, ring down through the ages. Of course I have adapted his words a little to the present day, and inserted some ideas and images under sudden inspiration, as any poet-translator would do. So here it is: read and tremble.

Athanaia! Athanaia! Xaira Theá!


Athenians! We know that Zeus will never plan our destruction
nor will any of the immortal gods plot against us,
For such is the power of Wisdom, our great-hearted goddess
Athena, daughter of the king of of gods,
she from whose bright temple extends her hands over all
who shelter in this blessed city.


But now her own people, for greed and profit,
risk ruining all, imperil the city itself with foolishness!
The leaders of the Assembly are of unsound mind:
bad morals and pride lead by the leash to a downfall.
Orgied, they know not how to restrain themselves,
or keep behind closed doors their gluttony and lust.
They have grown rich through bribes and malfeasance.
They loot the common land and temples, and steal
from the poor their tiny recompense. They scrawl
their one day's wishes on the tablets of law, rewrite
with their bloated thoughts the ways of our tradition.
The columns of Justice tremble but stand: does She
not know what is and was and has ever been?
Ah! she is silent, but for how long, Athenians?
How long until the truth avenges itself?


When corruption comes, the end is sure as disease
in wasting away the city: men's clouded reason
falls into an evil servitude, fathers and sons
brothers and sisters draw knives against one another
in civil discord and party strife. For no cause at all
except the desire to chaos, they bring us to War —
no matter the cause or pretext, a vile war does naught
but waste the prime and beauty of manhood,
leaving the polis a place of stumped cripples.



In their dark caucuses, yea, even in the Assembly,
they turn the ear to foreign conspirators; they turn
one faction of Athens against another, hating
their fellows more than the dread barbarians.
These evils seep down among the common folk,
those of little reason who but repeat the slogans
repeated o'er and o'er into their wearied brains.


How long will it be, if this goes on,
until our own citizens put on the chains of slavery?
How long until our own brothers are sent abroad
into strange servitude to masters we do not know?
How will we ever bring our kindred home
when their legs and minds are fettered thus?


And so the common evil comes to all, when flags
and bonnets and streaming slogans divide us,
house against house no longer neighbors at all.
Then come the evil officers with false arrest,
armed so that no door can bar their entry.
No matter what wall or hedge he leaps,
the single man cannot escape his judgment,
called before a dark and sinister tribunal.


So my heart bids me to tell you, Athens,
that even as bad government is as a pestilence
among us, good rule is like the cleansing breeze
that dissipates disease and ends disorder.
Wisdom shall hurl the evil-doers down
into the dark cells they have dug themselves
(all the cruel punishments their fevered minds
devised, not even those shall suffice to punish
the traitor who sells his own state to darkness!).


Wisdom shall smooth things out at the end,
if we choose her over hateful Eris, discord's
abominable mistress! She brings excess to order;
she stills the loud folly of bloated outrage.
No longer will weeds spring up in our roadways,
and once again will green abundance bless us
as all can walk freely without fear of slayers.


Wisdom shall straighten crooked judgments.
She tempers the pride of invention and wealth,
even the arrogance of the returning warrior.
The howling works of faction, the wrath of strife,
will gave way to common reason in the assembly.

Heed Athena, your only hope to make all good
and wise and perfect in the bright human world.

Athanaia! Athanaia! Xaira Theá!

Why Poetry?

by Brett Rutherford

In memoriam: Annette Hayn

I see you always
in that photograph:
a Breslau schoolgirl
on a Sunday outing,
resting
beside a woodland path.
Everything is still before you:
in German Silesia
that 1930s forest
where wolves
and elf-kings peeping
from the fern-fronds,
were the only things to fear.

Had you already read
the Schiller plays
with their bold heroes
and valiant women,
the Heine poems,
and the Goethe?

How far beyond those woods
were the Nazis waiting
to deny you the right
to your own German?

You sat in the audience
as Steinberg's hands waved
a brave Beethoven
from the Kulturbund orchestra,
until even Beethoven
was denied you.
The Jewish Kulturbund Orchestra
was banned from playing German music.

Later, the night-boat to England,
to boarding school,
away from the coming horror
of Holocaust —
to America —
to marriage and children.

Something was missing
on those chamber-music afternoons
when your husband tore into
Brahms and Bartok,
excluding you —

no place to be
where the need for purpose
did not haunt you.

The business of the dead
is to be remembered.
The business of survivors
is to bear testimony:
But what is the business
of those who escaped?

Find something,
do something,
your husband urged you.
You had no cello,
no violin —
only your hands,
a pen,
an ear for making word
follow word,
tightrope-walking lines,
stanzas with their own
bright magic.

You found it, finally.
Your world:
      surreally seen,
      Delilah and Noah's wife.
      much to do with doll houses,
      sailboats lost and found,
      the tracery of your children's
      lives and marriages,
      and the friendships found
           among the poets.

You mined your own childhood, too
and found it haunted
by the tread of history:
your father in Breslau
dreading the times to come,
your mother skiing
as though her life depended on it.

The places cannot be recovered:
Breslau obliterated
      by the Red Army
and swallowed into Poland;
the Berlin of your schooldays
a patchwork of memories,
your parents' names unwritten,
      fading from a whisper
           to the never-spoken

but you found your truth at last
in your poems and books,
where your escape
      bookended with silences
gifts us with thoughts
that will not perish.

— October 2, 2004, rev. 2019

Only An Apple

Translated by Brett Rutherford

     after a poem by Plato


      Melon ego. Ballei me philon de tis.
           All' epineudon,
      Xanthippe; kago kai dou marainómetha.


Look! I am only an apple.
Someone just fool enough
to love you, has thrown
me in your general direction.
Catch me, Xanthippe, now!
Tomorrow is too late for both of us:
a rotten fruit in a wrinkled hand.

Through Mirrors

by Brett Rutherford

  I play you through mirrors,  

angled dreamt visions of you  

I catch in candlelight

    halfway across the crowd-cafe

  you are fun-house warped to me

  so close I can almost touch

  each peach-fuzz hair on your cheek.

    You are all there, from head  

long-haired, to slender foot,  

leaner than ever, as thin  

as depth of glass. If I

    touch this, will you yield

  to my phantom?    

I send a ghost-messenger

  to follow your double home.

    There you go. There, with you,

  she (whatever she you deign

  to possess this evening)

  leans on your shoulder.

    My mirror self will follow.

  When he returns

  I'll reap the grief  of his report.

  Your kind  can only be wooed that way.

    You do not see me looking,

  longing. You lurk in corridors

       of cold seduction,

  between the mercury and glass.

Love Song in Finland

by Brett Rutherford

after a poem by Goethe ("Finnische Lied"), 1810

How would it be if the dear one
came back exactly as he left me?
I'd kiss those lips so fast he'd stumble,
even if they gleam a wolf-blood red.


He would have to take back, too,
that cold formal handshake, heart-death
to me, that parted us. I'd press
those fingers even if they felt like snakes.


What is wind but words repeated,
tree to tree, from cliffs resounding,
losing meaning over ice floes?
Just so, the whispered promises
fade off when love is too long absent.


What would you have me renounce? Food?
I would shun all cakes and pastries;
I would refuse the monk's poor stew,
Starving to win the beloved!
Whom once I charmed in fulgent June,
let him come, Winter-tamed, to stay.

Charlotte Bronte, the Ego Triumphant

In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the Victorian reader was presented with a shocking manifestation of personality: a female lead character who was poor, homely in appearance, intelligent, and absolutely unwilling to bow to arbitrary authority. Where the heroines of Anne Brontë's novels bore their misery in silence, or kept their superior intellects to their private diaries, Charlotte's title character has a fully-formed ego in childhood and does not hesitate to assert her evaluations of the bad behavior around her, to her great cost in most cases. So pronounced is Brontë's individualism, in fact, that it could be called a softer mirror of the feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the individualism of Thomas Paine, and a precursor of the Hegelian individualism that was taking shape on the continent in the mind of Max Stirner, author of The Ego and His Own, the first fully-developed statement of egoistic individualism.

You can read my paper on this topic here:

https://www.academia.edu/38398106/Charlotte_Bronte_-_The_Ego_Triumphant

The Partisan's Woman

by Brett Rutherford

1

There was a woman, wondrous fair,
and he loved her. She lived alone.
Her door was barred. Her lover last
had been a Partisan, and died
in the far-off mountains. No man
Had seen her face, or touched her since.

He came to her door at sunrise,
bleeding. He knocked until a voice,
behind thick wood called out "Who's there?"—
"One who loves you still and always.
I have killed a man, and I bleed." —

"What kind of man have you killed, now?"—
"Policeman," he stammered. "My love,
I killed an officer of law." —
"Was he a bad officer, then?" —
"Like a wolf to the innocent." —
The bolts shot free. Just one pale hand
extended a clean, white bandage.
"Go and take care that no one sees you."

2

There was a woman, wondrous fair,
And he loved her. One dusk, he knocked
until the soft voice called, "Who is it?" —
"One who loves you still and always.
I have freed ten men from prison.
Help we need to reach the border."
The bolts shot free. Both hands held out
a sack of bread and provisions.
She leaned forth and let him kiss her.
"Go and take care that no one sees you."

3

There was a woman, wondrous fair,
and he loved her. Midnight, he knocked
until she stirred and asked, "Who is it?" —
"I who love you still and always.
I have brought you the tyrant's head."
Down he hurled it on her threshold.
The bolts shot free. Into her arms
the woman took him, laughing loud.
Goblets had she, and wine a-plenty.
"Love me," she said. "Love me from now
until the day they come for us."

4

And the age of hard wars was long,
and the hunger consumed many.
The bees from the hive were absent,
and the dry nests fell from the trees.
Seas rose, storms fed the hurricanes.
Whirlwinds harrowed the empty fields.
Nights lay silent — crickets and frogs,
owls and nightingales on strike,
awaiting the high victory
of species, of each against each
and mankind against everything.

A hundred times the earth returned
to the place it thought it started.
There stood, in a leafless forest,
the partisan's woman's cottage,
a rotting skull upon its doorstep.

Nevermore did oak door open,
and nevermore were seen the man
or the woman wondrous and fair.

An Old Flame

by Brett Rutherford

On the eve of this dreaded holiday
I scanned the mailbox for pink fringes,
heart-shapes and scarlet arrows.

None, the gods be thanked.
I am well past pursuing, loth
to imagine myself the object
of any being's affection.

I glanced at internet beauty,
spectator sport. And look!
an urgent email
from someone who knew my name,
a mystery "old flame," he wrote me.
"How old?" I queried skeptically.
"You were my first," he teased back.

A date was made. The hour came,
and as expected, no one arrived.
I listened to Bach for an hour
then drifted off to sleep.

Sunrise on Valentine's Day
my eyes rolled open. Some
one was in the bed with me.
We turned to face each other.

It was a Trilobite.

{Revised May 2019].

By A Roman Road Forgotten

I started this translation many years ago and stopped after three stanzas, feeling not up to the complex challenges posed by this powerful poem of protest. This is Yevtushenko's equivalent to Shelley's "Ozymandias." The poem resonates not only with its time, but with the present. The poet was in Syria in 1966 and was taken to see a stretch of a Roman road. No one knew who built it or when.
We know a great deal more now. The road was called the Strata Diocletiana, and was built under the order of the Emperor Diocletian from 284 to 305 CE. So it is a late addition to the vast road system that ran all over the Empire, some of it maintained for more than 800 years. Talk about infrastructure! This stretch of Roman roads held the Syrian territory, which included Judea, together connecting Palmyra and Damascus all the way down to Arabia.
Yevtushenko wrote this in 1966. Brezhnev was in power. Every word he said and wrote was carefully watched by the state, ever since he wrote his famous poem about "Babi Yar" five years earlier. Things had to be said carefully, by indirection, or not at all. The sight of the ruined road of a forgotten Roman regime may have seemed a gateway into a poem that could say much, yet seem to be about a remote time and place, about "imperialists" the Soviet authorities could not object to his portraying as corrupt and evil.
The poem resonates now, too, since Syria is once again a battle ground over which sinister and arrogant empires and faux-empires are fighting. Fighters may be creeping along this 1700-year-old road at night. As as we have to deal with a wanna-be Emperor of our own, the poem is an urgent warning about hubris from these parts.
I have translated this fairly close to the original. But it is an adaptation, with such liberties as the moment induced. I have also added a few lines here and there to add factual details about the road's identity and Diocletian's name. Since it is known now, we had might as well name the Emperor and place the road in its historical moment, not Rome in its glory but Rome a hundred years from its end.

Enough said: here is the poem, in my first draft translation.


*** ***
BY A ROMAN ROAD FORGOTTEN

Translation by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from a Russian poem by Evgenii Yevtushenko

By a Roman road forgotten,
not far away from Damascus,
dead-faced mountains wear away
like masks of an ancient emperor.

Fat snakes that warm themselves
draw back their heads in coils,
bask their scales in the sunlight,
keeping their self-important secrets,
as if they had been with Cleopatra!

This was a road of damascene,
that rarest of steels for swords,
trade route for pearls and rubies,
rubbed clean by the bodies of slaves.

Legions marched in to invade,
profiles like Roman coins,
breast plates of bronze concealing
the venereal plagues of the armies.

Wheeled chariots once swayed
(before their wood was torn for cook-fire),
leaning beneath their drivers
like the crested coifs of empresses.

Laying the flagstones was the death
of slaves untold, each stone the back
of one fossilized workman,
an easy-ridden-over cenotaph.

Grown tired of his hot and Syrian exile
(too warm to even think in Latin),
the elegant patrician puts down
his lemon ice, to swab himself
in the finest Etruscan oil.

"Who cares if we crush this rabble
till nothing is left but skull and bones?
We Romans will not die like worms,
and the road will always save us."

Words not heard by the Arab mason,
dutifully pounding his hammer
to a slave-song obstinate,
a Syriac slave-song full of cunning.

"Thinking only about the flesh,
you have forgotten the gods.
Your death I hammer here,
and the road's death too."

Empire, decayed at the roots,
crept on, agape with gore;
veined, not like a tree,
but as a patchwork of blood.

Against resisters the Romans did
what they did best: the fire and tongs,
but torture victims sewn together
can only hold out so long.

The Romans took to sleeping naked,
their haughty togas put aside,
and so it was the Empire died,
and as well the ruined road I stand on.

They passed off their crimes to others
with the ease of the forger's art.
Some mile stones have only
the distant Emperor's name,
and some say nothing since
Diocletian had many worries,
least among them those awful Christians.
Who dies making the road is no one's
business. The road is not to blame.

But generations of wild grass
have had their way with it.
Only ghosts and goatherds walk
the dead Strata Diocletiana.
The road that engendered crime
Is now itself outlaw and criminal.

Let all the roads to executions,
and all the highways to tyrants' follies
come at the end to this ultimate payment:
forgotten, forever, in the highest weeds.

Damascus-Moscow 1967-68.

The Poet Who Starved

by Brett Rutherford

After Uhland

Such was his lot — each dismal day
was short and marked with sorrow,
and just as a poet ought, he withered
and quite forgotten, passed away.

He was an ill-starred baby
with only a muse hag for a nurse-maid,
and she it was who taught him
to sing whether supper came or no.

His mother, if one could call her that,
crisped early to her unmarked urn,
and so she marked his doom,
an anonymous and unread vessel
unfit for holding and keeping gold.

When all around passed pewter mugs,
flagons and cups and champagne flutes,
he was the one they scorned to cheer,
pouring the dregs on the cindered ground.

He knew the names of their vintages,
the lineage kings who had trod the valleys;
he could tell the rise and fall of empires,
but not one sip was for him!

Still, smiles came to him every Spring,
his dreams of blossoms woven,
but others hewed the trees to splinters,
boots muddying his purple stream.

When others orgied on holidays, game days
and feasts, and victory parades,
he raised his proud cup from afar —
his clear cold water; their groaning boards.

The others watched as he walked on by,
between his study and the library shelves,
thought him a being of scarcely flesh.
He must have inherited some money, of course.

"He's almost a ghost, an other-worldly man.
He doesn't live like us. Ambrosia and mead,
strange fruits and berries, a millet stew
must be the provender of his monkish days."

Dead! dead! they found him there
over the crumbs of the last saltine, the pot
of weak tea too many times infused
until it was but shaded water.

There was nothing in his house! Just papers!
Cupboards zig-zaggedy with spiderwebs,
refrigerator unplugged, a gasless stove,
plates in the sink too far gone for even mould.

At least it was easy to carry him, pine box
not much heavier than a pine box and a suit
of clothes. No hearse for him: a handcart
sufficed to roll him off to the graveyard.

His weak tread had scarcely marked the dust
when he walked of nights. Now may the earth
rest lightly on his shoulders. May someone find
those papers he left behind, and publish them.
May someone remember those words were his.

Sarah Helen Whitman Book Goes to Press

After six months of furious research, annotation, and editing, Break Every Bond: Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence has gone to press. Here is the full description of the book:
BREAK EVERY BOND: SARAH HELEN WHITMAN IN PROVIDENCE. Literary Essays and Selected Poems. Edited and Annotated by Brett Rutherford.

Sarah Helen Whitman (1803-1878), poet and critic, is best known for her brief engagement to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, and for her role as Poe's posthumous defender in her 1860 book, Edgar Poe and His Critics. She is seldom treated as more than an incidental person in Poe biography, and no books of her own poetry were reprinted after 1916. As critic, she was a ground-breaking American defender of Poe, Shelley, Byron, Goethe, Alcott, and Emerson, yet none of her literary essays other than her defense of Poe have ever appeared in book form. She and her friend Margaret Fuller are credited with being the first American women literary critics.

This volume presents Whitman's literary essays with more than 500 annotations and notes, tracing her literary sources and allusions, and revealing the remarkable breadth of her readings in literature, philosophy, history, and science. Brett Rutherford's biographical essay is rich in revelations about Whitman's time and place, her family history, and her muted career as poet, essayist, and den mother to artists and writers. Exploding the standard view of her as the secluded "literary widow," we can now perceive her as a literary radical pushing against a conservative milieu; a suffragist and abolitionist who dabbled in séances; and a devotee of the New England Transcendentalists and the German Idealists who inspired them.

The complete text of Edgar Poe and His Critics presented here, includes the opposing texts by Rufus Griswold, whose libels provoked her landmark defense of Poe's writing and character. This annotated version identifies all the contemporary press reviews and books Whitman read and critiqued, making it indispensable for students of Edgar Allan Poe.

The selected poems in this volume include the hyper-Romantic traversal of rival mythologies in "Hours of Life," her most ambitious work; her poems to and about Edgar Allan Poe; sensitive and atmospheric nature portrayals; a defense of the then-reviled art of the drama; a love poem from Proserpine to Pluto; an occasional poem about Rhode Island penned in the after-shadow of the Dorr Rebellion; and translations from French and German poets, most notably the most famous of all European ghost ballads, Bürger's "Leonora." Whitman's allusions and unattributed quotations from other poets are all annotated, making this book a must for scholars and students.

ISBN 0-978-0-922558-00-1. 302 pp., 6 x 9 inches, paperback. Published February 2019. $18.95.
AVAILABLE NOW:
ORDER FROM AMAZON NOW.

Across the Sublime Divide: Dryden and Handel

Back in 2006, I created a web page template for presenting short academic papers in an easy-to-read format. I took a paper that I had written about Handel's Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day and formatted it. It's been sitting on my website for a while, and to my surprise it's even been cited by a couple of scholars. Take a peek if it interests you, not just for its Introduction to Handel's work, but also for my web design. The idea was to have this as an empty template, and the user could paste in text from word and do just a minimum of formatting. The fonts will differ from user to user -- I call up my favorite fonts in descending order, and what you see depends on what you have, the lowest common denominator being the hated Times Roman.

The intro to the paper reads:

Handel’s 1739 musical setting of it, Ode for St. Cecilia’s
Day, signify the meeting of poetry and music in the realm of
the Sublime. Dryden’s poem takes music and its role in the
universe as its theme, and hence invites examination against
the eighteenth century’s radically evolving aesthetics of the
Sublime. Handel’s musical work, setting to music a text
about music itself, invites study to determine whether
musical practice in Handel’s time enacted the aesthetics of
contemporaneous poets and critics, insofar as they claimed to
understand the Beautiful and the Sublime in music.
This paper will attempt to illustrate the enormous gap
between the two arts by showing that eighteenth-century
British critical understanding of music was based on
abstract ideas largely unrelated to musical practice, an
understanding that failed to acknowledge music as an art
capable of sublime effect on its own. I will use Handel’s
work to demonstrate that composers achieve sublime
effects — with or without text — by employing harmonic,
dynamic and rhythmic techniques that constitute a kind of
rhetoric. This techne, closer to the Sublime of Longinus
than to that of Burke or Kant, allows music its
acknowledged power even when accompanied with lessthan-
inspired text. I will review some of the criticism
around Dryden’s poem that relates to its original 1687
musical setting, and then examine Handel’s work itself on a musicological basis.

View the Handel-Dryden Paper Here.

Books by Poet's Press Authors

You can find the ordering links to all the Poet's Press books on our main webpage.

Here are shortcuts to some of our long-time authors:

Emilie Glen

• Emilie Glen Vol 1
• Emilie Glen Vol 2
• Emilie Glen Vol 3
• Emilie Glen Vol 4

Emily Greco

• Things to Do When Dead

Annette Hayn

• Chamber Music
• Enemy on the Way to School
• One Armed Flyer
• Journeys Around One Point

Heinrich Heine

• Heine: Germany

Barbara A. Holland

• Crises of Rejuvenation
• Autumn Numbers
• Holland Collected Poems
• In the Shadows