After a week of swallowing sandpaper,
Of hag-coughing myself breathless,
Of stubborn pain pounding each ear,
It's time to return.
This glimpse of frailty makes me hurry back
Though barely two thirds fit,
To prove some microscopic bug
A billionth of my size, can't lay me low
For ever.
But a handful of dust is all it takes
To put pride into perspective,
We walk upon a weakly hardened crust
Above the molten fires of leering doom.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
The last two lines of this are so poetically powerful by comparison to the rest of the poem, which is more prosaic in style and has a flavour of the everyday about it (mentioning sandpaper and the microscopic size of the bug) that I actually googled them to see if you were quoting someone famous. Especially as you have quoted TS Eliot in the first line of verse 3. But no, it is just the sudden jump into iambic pentameter that fooled me. However I do think these last two lines are wonderful.
ReplyDeleteI say sudden but actually it is prefigured in the previous verse, in lines one and four, so the poem seems to gradually move from the everyday into the epic, the rhythm of Shakespeare. We think we are in the twenty first century but gradually we are guided into the sands of Shelley's Ozymandias (sandpaper? dust?) and reminded of the frailty of our existence.
Actually the last two lines, though not actually a quote, are an allusion to Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent.
ReplyDelete