A Five-Sonnet Sequence by Phillip Whidden

Scorn

“Enargeîs is the technical term ‘for divine epiphany: a word that contains the dazzle of “white,” argós, which comes to designate a pure, unquestionable “conspicuous-ness” ’ ”.  ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 19

I wonder if perhaps we moderns know
This brilliant whiteness much more clearly than
The ancients did. They made their temples glow
With painted color like the rainbow span
But more intense. The goddess and the god
Were daubed with firmest tints of red and gold,
Blues, reds, greens—strong as emeralds. How odd
That seems to us when what we know is bold
Severest white divinities and stone
Carved columns. Noontime light in Greece
Reveals the purest color for a throne,
A god’s own seat that might hold Jason’s fleece.
Before the gods became poetic wares,
Divinities appeared as white-hot glares.

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Personalized Epiphany

“This ‘conspicuousness’, he adds ‘will later be inhabited by poetry, thus becoming perhaps the characteristic that distinguishes poetry from every other form.’” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 19

Deep poetry does something depths can not
Do. It stands out among the arts, a thing
Conspicuous in power. Music, hot
With inspiration, has a different wing
Which rises in the air and heart, but lines
Of Mariana trench profoundness work
Inside the heart, inside its fathom brines
And currents. Down in that divinest murk
Are frigid swelters only words can tell.
The plastic arts appeal to eye alone,
Or sometimes hand, but do not cast the spell
Veins need. Paints do not travel in the bone.
The theatre and film demand too much
Control. A poem grants the reader’s touch.

Where? Where? Where?

“Achieved poetry paints with at least one colour  which can be found nowhere else.”
~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 19

Do you know just what that color is? Gods’
Eyes must contain it—goddesses’ more so—
Yet can we see it there? Perhaps it nods
At us with holy winks above the slow
Convictions of a palm tree’s fronds before
The sacrifice by priests in island shades.
Perhaps it gives us glimpses from the floor
Of marble temples. Mostly it evades
Us. That is why it matters. Those who grasp
The color, artisans with words, do not
Themselves know what it is. Fists barely clasp
It in their lines. The hue hates being caught.
Once found it fades. It must be caught again.
The rainbow trout gasps out in air-filled pain.

Treatments in English Lessons

Yet even poetry is now without
Transcendence. No one wants to read it. No
One pays for it and no one is devout
About it as they were before the glow
Of cinema and television screens.
Forget about the God is dead debate.
Forget about the notion that machines
Could write it and computers might dictate
It. It is now long dead for most except
For weddings, funerals, engagement showers
And such. No man or woman now is swept
Away to love by sonnets. They have lost their powers.
The poem’s stored in classrooms only. Still
It’s there—given like a cultural pill.

Stunned, Stung with Aesthetic Tears

“When it reaches Alexandria, poetry comes in out of the sun, retires to the library . . . And so it [poetry] survives in a world where the vulgar tongue is not Greek.” ~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 19

At Florida Technological U
One afternoon I had some time to kill,
Or I was bored with working my way through
Some Library Science. Needing health’s pill
I headed for the shelves of poems doomed
To be unopened in the stacks and took
Anthologized poems down. Wonder loomed.
I read an ode by Keats. The cosmos shook.
My eyes sang out with tears and not because
Of sentiment inside those lines. The tears
Burned down my cheeks because of beauty’s laws.
The ode was like the music of the spheres.
Perfection in the crafting of each line,
And not words’ meanings, formed that white stone shrine.

Phillip Whidden is a poet published in America, England, Scotland (and elsewhere) in book form, online, and in journals.  He has also had an article on Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est” published in The New Edinburgh Review. www.phillipwhidden.com