Good for you, Janet, alcaics deserve a separate thread, and you picked a knockout to illustrate them. Like Auden's poem,
Robinson is simply counting syllables, not imitating the classical meter. I've tried my hand at the English version of the meter--not as successfully as Robinson--but rhythmically interesting. (I'm taking off on Horace, III, 6, of course.)
TO THE AMERICANS
Not till every blackened church has been rebuilt,
and you have repented in dust and ashes—
of God mocked in the universities,
blasphemous jokes in the chic galleries,
repented, even though you yourselves be guiltless,
of covetous hearts, of ears uncircumcised,
deaf to others’ pain, of worshiping
wealth and filth, of overweening power,—no,
not till you call to mind the ancient mystery:
only obedience to Him commands obedience,
will you face your shame, Americans,
and only then begin to make amends.
You have already faced the Lord’s fierce anger,
faced the humiliation of being forced
to watch one of your sons, a naked
corpse dragged through the dust of Mogadishu,
all around him the faces of his killers,
gloating savages, one wearing his dog tags;
and bombed-out embassies, innocent
Africans butchered for your fathers’ sins;
and our own streets in flames, drifting with tear gas,
tears for the future. The long oozings of lust,
rage and rebellion steeped three decades,
the venom gathering strength month by month,
—until today, the nubile preteen reveling
in hip-hop, her virginity twenty times lost
(discarded, rather), lies dreaming of
what new taste-thrill? whips? threesomes? Whatever.
Meanwhile, one who could be her older sister,
her mother even, stands ready to open
her scented privacies to a stranger,
some stockbroker buddy of her husband’s
(and her husband knows: he was the go-between!)
Cunt on the house. Or else she’s off on her own—
what fun to find her own whoremaster,
lift her skirts to him in her marriage bed.
Not from such unclean loins did the lean farmboys,
the hardbitten wranglers and factory stiffs spring
who waded ashore at Normandy,
those the bullets hadn’t yet cut in half—
no, those who bled for and saved us, those who died
in the Solomons, in the Ardennes, in the sky,
tough, God-fearing young men who sweated
blood in the blast furnace, rode the tractor
long past sundown, or else rode the rods, cooking
a thin slumgullion in the hobo jungles,
or sold windfall fruit on grey sidewalks,
thin shirts and sharp faces against winter,
they came of better stock. May God have mercy.
Their grandchildren, so licentious, so greedy,
go on dancing, drinking and snorting,
lovelessly fucking, all frantic, manic—
Degeneration doesn’t come suddenly
to an end; shrugged at, accepted, it takes over.
Who will die to save their grandchildren,
come face to face once more with real evil?
after Horace
[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited July 10, 2004).]
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