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In this podcast, Nick Fabbri and Dr. Paul Monk discuss and recite a further selection of poems from Monk's recent collections dedicated to his muse, Rachael: Red Ochre For The Moon Goddess and Wine On The Flames. These 600+ poems represent a unique, enduring, and intellectually intimate poet-muse relationship forged largely across continents and oceans.
Key Discussion Points include:
Poetry as Self-Expression: Contrasting his objective world affairs analysis with the self-expression of poetry, which reflects inner feelings, experience, and meaning.
The Extraordinary Muse: Monk credits Rachael's deep literacy, wit, and singular focus on wanting poetry for catalyzing the abundance of his verse (600+ poems).
The Poetic Act vs. Life: A core paradox is discussed: their relationship is sustained because a conventional life is not possible due to distance and age, allowing them to be fully engaged in "loving and living" through poetry.
Classical and Erotic Metaphors: Monk frames the relationship using classical literature for erotic or political contexts, such as Odysseus and Circe in the Odyssey ("In the House of the Goddess") or the long courtship likened to Alexander the Great's Siege of Tyre ("The Siege of Tyre").
The Battle of the Soul: Poems reflect the internal struggle between the poet's rational mind and his fervent emotional reality, often using military and mythological figures like Rommel of the Heart or the dismembered Osiris (raised by Rachael/Isis).
Metaphysics of Love: Monk utilises complex philosophical concepts, like the search for transcendent purpose, referencing Goethe's Roman Elegies and the Kabbalah (the garden of pomegranates) to give dignity and meaning to their unconventional relationship.
Tributes to the Classics: The collections frequently engage with literary masters, including reflections on Catullus ("Catullus 101"), Shelley ("Reading Epipsychidion"), and the medieval poets Dante and Petrarch.
Modernity and Romance: The poetry blends the ancient and modern, contrasting Verdi's La Traviata (with his rival as Baron Douphol) with spontaneous modern communication, such as Rachael's elegant Latin text: amor recumbens aurorae.
The Final Elegy: The structure is bookended by an elegy (Book XXIV) that appropriates the funeral pyre of Hector from the Iliad, suggesting that the collected verse itself is the glistening "Wine On The Flames" of his mortal experience
The Poet's Lot: The ultimate goal is the preservation of this unique love, culminating in the sonnet's wish that the 700 poems would be "roses dried and pressed/ Heaped around your place of final rest".
Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilisation in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.
Dr. Paul Monk on Poetry (Part 2): Further Poems from ‘Red Ochre For The Moon Goddess’ and ‘Wine On The Flames’
Recorded in Melbourne, 16 November 2025
[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 0:30)
Welcome to Bloom, a podcast about anything and everything. My name is Nick Fabbri and I'll be your host for today. I'm fortunate to be joined again by my dear friend, Dr. Paul Monk, a writer and poet based here in Melbourne. Today's episode builds on earlier conversations featuring Paul's poetry, including a selection of poems from Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess and Wine on the Flames, two of Paul's latest works. Paul, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
[Dr. Paul Monk] (0:31 - 1:38)
Thanks, Nick. It's great to be back. And I must say that I'm really enjoying reciting poetry.
It's wonderful having conversations about world affairs, about autobiography and other topics. We've covered a lot of ground. But I think I said in an early recording about poetry that the thing about talking on world affairs and other aspects of important social issues is that that's the objective world.
That's where you have to be disciplined and serious in what you say and how you say it. You have to be strictly rational, really, about how you argue. Poetry is different, not because you've got a licence to be irrational, but because it's self-expression. It's how you feel about things, what you've experienced, what it means to you. That's a different category altogether of communication. You can write it, you can share it privately and in print, but reciting it, enabling other people to listen to how you feel as well as seeing what you say about how you feel, that's a special experience.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:39 - 2:28)
And perhaps a remark on the format of these kinds of conversations we've had in the last couple of days. There should be about three separate poetry recordings now. And the intention is not necessarily to say something or to have a dialogue or a conversation about the poetry
It's really to, as Paul said before, allow the poetry to speak for itself and allow Paul to show and to recite the poetry and to demonstrate the feelings that these experiences with these muses have brought up within him over recent years. So I suppose we encourage our listeners to sit back, relax, and let themselves be taken away by the words rather than expecting a two-way dialogue with me involved as well. It's very much a sort of audio book, I'd say, Paul.
[Dr. Paul Monk] (2:28 - 2:52)
Yes, I think that is the idea. And it's a great pleasure to paraphrase what you were just saying: rather than dissecting and debating the poems, what we're doing is simply giving them a chance to breathe, putting them out there, and then other people can think about them as much as they like. In fact, that's the very idea.
[Nick Fabbri] (2:53 - 3:01)
Well, without further ado, Paul, would you like to give us an overview of the amount and type of poems you'll be reciting today and from what works?
[Dr. Paul Monk] (3:01 - 1:05:05)
Yes, indeed. So Nick mentioned that the poems will be drawn from either of two books that I've written in the last four years. All of these poems, both of these books are poems written for Rachael. We did a recording, the other day, of 22 poems for Rachel. In offering more, and there'll be significantly more in this recording, partly because many of these will be short poems, 12-liners.
I just want to underscore the fact that the abundance of poetry, the size of each of these books being in the order of 300 or more poems, is because Rachael has really been an extraordinary muse. What she wanted from me all the way through was poetry. She's very literate. She's very witty. She's polylingual. She speaks beautifully. And this has just been the greatest gift to a poet.
You know, I think it's important to underscore here that, if I was a younger man and the overriding objective here was, let's say, sexual desire and the usual impulse to get together with the beloved and live together, sleep together, even have children, then maybe that would have happened. And there might not have been any poetry or very little, because we have been too busy loving and living. But the reality is that I'm a man of advancing years. I don't seriously believe that those things are possible for us. And I'm not sure that that's what she wants.
It's clear that she's immensely intelligent. And in a world where poetry is rather scarce, and where other men in her life have had no idea of how to write a poem, she reached out to me seeking intelligent connection and poetry. And it's turned into the most extraordinary poet-muse relationship; beyond anything I've previously experienced. So I see these books as a homage to this remarkable woman, this very unique woman.
That's one of the reasons why I'd like to, and will today, share more of the poems I've written for her - as much variety as we can squeeze into an hour or so. All that said, I'd like to begin with a poem that was one of the last to be written. It sits as a kind of epigraph at the beginning of Wine on the Flames. Why begin there rather than, as it were, chronologically earlier? I think because the completion of the two books is a real watershed in the poet-muse relationship and in my life.
This poem refers to the final book of the Iliad and to the funeral of Hector, the great Trojan hero, from which the very title of the second book, Wine on the Flames, is taken. It's a metaphorical rendering of that book, in which I appropriate that meaning and the idea of Hector's life and death for myself, as if, in a manner of speaking, I'm Hector. A Hector, if you like, of words rather than swords. And that sets the tone for the rest of the poetry having been written. In a sense, it's an elegy for the experience I've had. It goes as follows:
Book XXIV
The games were over now, this book declaims.
The gathered armies scattered to their ships,
While warriors, relieved of death's dark press,
Took nourishment and then the grip of sleep.
I, conversely, as I start to read
The god's debate about Achilles' rage
And what to do with Hector's fallen body,
Am freshly woken, bathed, and exercised.
Immersed in Homer, it occurs to me
That I have stood before the Scion Gate,
Confronting death, within a world of song,
And that Achilles' scorn has been my fate.
The body of my work, it might be said,
Has bounced behind the killer's chariot,
Both in circles round the walls of Troy
And around the tomb of Patroclus.
But you, sweet Iris, sent from Mount Olympus
To intercede, while still my body lasts,
That it may be released into the hands
Of Priam, lord of Ilium itself.
You, it was, who called the grieving King
To venture deep into the Argive's camp,
At the heel of Hermes, harbinger
And hand of high Olympus, hailing Hector,
Out of muteness, out of clay and anger,
Ransomed with the treasures of Pergamum,
Borne upon hermetic wheels until
Cassandra lit upon them from the heights,
And cried, in tones that rang through all of Troy,
Look down, you men of Troy, you Trojan women!
The hero is returned alive from war.
Our greatest joy, the king now brings him home.
You know, as I now drink my morning coffee,
I know, for I am reading Homer's lines,
Of how the epic ends with Hector's rites,
His white bones buried in a golden chest.
You, my love, have brought this body back,
Within the walls of honour, flame, and wine.
You've ensured my hallowed grave won't lack
The purple of completion - yours and mine.
The second poem is called ‘Melding Libraries’. It's a kind of sister poem to ‘Sennacherib’. In that earlier poem, I put myself into the persona of the Assyrian king, Sennacherib, and his exultant sense that he has built Nineveh with its Hanging Garden and its Unrivalled Palace, and that all of this is a gift to the love of his life, the woman that he has married. In ‘Melding Libraries’, I elaborate on that theme, as will be seen, by going back, actually, to when he was courting her.
He sends courtiers to her, offering her gifts and offering her marriage. she replies in a way that he finds fascinating. She says, I'm willing to come to Nineveh and be your consort, but on one condition, and that is that you permit me to bring with me my own personal library, which, let me tell you, includes every story written since the Flood, many of the stories annotated in my hand, and to meld them with your imperial library as our joint possession. And that's the undercurrent in the poem, and you'll see where I take it. Here it is:
Melding libraries
What a metaphor you have suggested,
The melding of our private libraries,
Something intimate and existential,
Something only you would recommend.
Where would it begin, our catalogue?
How would we, the rulers of the world,
Create the harmonies in our collection,
Integrating Babylon with Asua?
Oh, you, the mistress of my master heart,
Having of your own volition sought
The lithographic records of the past,
From ancient Sumer, Akkad, and the East,
Now tell me that to come to Nineveh,
To wed me in the lion-courts I've made,
You'd have to bring your annotated copies
Of the tales recounted since the flood,
Not least your wryly overwritten slate,
Your slate of hand, revising Gilgamesh
As priestess-poet of the primal temple,
As avatar of Ishtar of the moon.
What is it now? Three thousand years of writing,
Since scribes contrive the art of characters,
Since memory was brilliantly encoded
In pictograms in our cuneiform?
And you, who'd come to me in beauty,
Gift of my inheritance of power,
Prize above all properties this treasure,
Deep time incised in perdurable stone.
You take my breath away, exotic princess,
For this, if nothing else, though well I ken,
Your many depths, your cultivated graces,
Your stature as the paragon of women,
That my unrivalled palace shall contain
The library of Babel, taken from
The fallen Babylon of vanquished pride,
Was broadcast by the couriers I sent
To woo you to the plans for Nineveh,
But they reported back that you'd agree
To have my hand, to come so far for me,
If and only if your library
Could, by our consensual design,
Be melded with the vast imperial
Bibliotheca my architects
Had sketched out for the lord of all the world.
Oh queen of night, oh mistress of the heavens,
Who but thou could venture such a bid,
Who but thou could confidently claim
To hold in her possession matching wealth,
For it is not the characters in stone
That you propose to mix and match with mine,
But rather all your readings of the same,
Which render them uniquely personal,
And these you offer now to blend with mine,
Presuming in your queenliness of spirit
That any slates, whatever classics I
Give pride of place in my unrivalled palace,
Will, like yours, be deftly annotated,
Marked with wit and scored for further time,
Absorbed into the subtle craft of mind
That any lord of all the world ought have.
And you, in making this sublime condition,
Signal to that mind, in its presumption,
That you'd be more than ornament at court,
More than mother to our royal heir.
You'd be intimate companion, muse,
Whose conversation, wit and varied learning,
Among my sphinxes and my scented doors,
Beneath the foliage and on the waters
Of the hanging garden, your demesne,
Would more than grace the summit of my power,
Will do far more than entertain a king,
Will fructify his inmost sense of self.
Oh Tashmetu-sharrat, you cast to me
So rich an offer, more than any king
In all the ages of this warring world
Has fielded in dowries or possession.
The melding of our libraries, what a thought!
Only one who had this in her gift,
While conscious of her consummate appeal,
Could have conceived, could have advanced it so.
But that, in floating such a bold idea,
You should state that Gilgamesh himself
Has been the object of your hermeneutics,
Encapsulates your loftiness of mind.
It hints at how, as Ishtar, you would shape
The inner thought, the sensibility
Of this your hero, this the architect
Of empire reaching down to Lebanon.
I shall, in light of this, draw deeper breath
Than heretofore, and just on your account,
I shall advise my draughtsmen and their minions,
In the framing of the inmost chambers,
To carve upon the lintels of their doors,
That you are here, my most beloved spouse,
That you imbue the shelves within these portals
With the meaning books, as such, can have.
That, for your sake, transcending vanities,
Your faithful king will now become a poet,
Breathing time and fable, wondering
At discourse as our bliss and covenant.
The next poem, the third, is called ‘Before Breakfast’, and it's a poem with quite a history. It was written off the top of my head on a whim, a decade ago actually, for a friend or lover that I'd met briefly, in Cancun, on a visit there. But it's been very popular with various people [including Rachael] for its wordplay and, let it be said, its eroticism. So here it is, by what might be called special request:
Before breakfast
You are in the interrogation-room, sweet lady.
Your limbs spread, in tremulous bewilderment,
When I asked: Would you care for a little
Cunnilingus - before I bring you breakfast?
Other words dance on the tip of my tongue,
But how will you receive them lying there?
Ah, truth to tell, your labia minora long,
Do they not - Don't lie! - for my longing?
For my wondrous palabrations, for such
Discursive flickers of my subtle tongue,
To divulge wantonly their red assent,
To disgorge a joyful concordance,
Such that your unuttered ecstasy will come
To seem entirely unambiguous and unfeigned,
For all we tested, boxed, and cunning linguists
Well know that art can overlay apparent pleasures.
Will you, therefore, lie in such a cause,
Or pause to heed, or better yet receive,
Not the questioning only, but the lingering parole,
The suggestions, dancing and darting lingually,
That I put to you, between your parted sighs?
For believe me, that this masked interrogation
Has been invented, given vent, has only
Been breathed into the imaginary,
Tabled, laid before my eyes, made
The occasion for such fluid ejaculation
By the stimuli, the caressed potentialities
Rumoured forth from your own lips,
Not, I grant, quite literally, but arising,
Budding at your bidding. Breakfast, then?
The fourth poem is called ‘Temple Ritual’. It is also quite an early poem, and the history, as it were, of this poem bears briefly recounting. It was written based on a growing sense of intimacy, quite early, with Rachael, and then when the book was coming together, Ingrida Rocis, who was doing the drawings for the book, sketched out a drawing of the priestess in the poem leading me, the poet, into the temple.
We showed the sketch to Rachael, and she said, my right hand should be reaching back to find your fingers, which was a lovely thought, and really quite an iconic one in the context of the whole cycle of poetry. So Ingrida redid the drawing, and it came out quite beautifully, and this is the poem that goes with that drawing, so to speak.
Temple ritual
There was an ancient ritual, they say,
Belonging to the cult of Aphrodite,
Whose practise takes us back to long before
Ascetic or self-flagellating sects
Slandered and suppressed the Queen of Hearts.
Devotees or adepts of the cult,
According to the legends handed down,
If they desired to be initiated,
Had to bring an offering to the temple:
Pork sausage, figs, and fresh goat's milk.
Once within the temple's sacred precinct,
The male initiand had to disrobe,
Then bring his gifts and lay them at the altar.
There, the long-haired priestess would inspect
His proffered goods, while hailing Aphrodite.
Should his sausage, figs, and milk pass muster,
The young initiand would then be guided
To a perfumed pool for his ablutions,
Where nymphs would cleanse him for the temple's use,
Anoint him, and then lead him back to her.
Then he would, or so the legend tells,
Be taken by the priestess at her pleasure,
A woman of extraordinary ilk,
With hair of gold, with eyes of emerald green,
Her skin like silk, her limbs both lithe and lean.
But should the adept's offering not find favour,
The supplicant was driven from the temple,
Whipped and scorned by those same striking nymphs.
Then, crying ‘Aphrodite!’, in his pain,
Chastened, he'd reflect - and try again.
The priestess, on the opening day of Spring,
Would, by custom, of the adepts choose
A fine upstanding youth, and leading him,
Within the inner confines of the temple,
Bring him at last to her own secret room.
There, upon soft coverlets of wool,
She'd murmur to him Aphrodite's lore.
And, when he thought he'd learned that lore in full,
Extend him in the arts of love some more:
The ecstasies and mysteries at the core
Of that eternal cult, its source divine.
And, even as she did, would feed the youth
On Aphrodite's anchovies and wine,
That he would taste, not only hear, the truth,
Imbibing her deep wisdom, line by line.
The fifth poem is called ‘Morning Walk’. It's really quite a simple poem about, as the title itself suggests, taking a morning walk and reflecting on all the beauty and stimulus that Rachael was bringing to my life.
Morning walk
This morning stands forever in its beauty,
Less because the verdure of the trees,
The azure sky, the softness of the breeze,
Projected spring upon my strolling mind,
Than because that mind was filled with you,
Dazzled by your banter and your wit,
The music you had sent to wake me up,
Your statement that our coming book of verse
Must be graced with golden lettering
And ‘half-Morocco bindings, I insist’,
Or by your offer, if I wrote this poem,
to tell me of a secret: how it was
King Harold fell at Senlac to the Normans,
Given you read Latin and have seen
The Bayeaux Tapestry, endorsing it,
Not to mention the astonishment
You caused me, in suggesting trialogue
Between myself and you and my good friend;
Claiming ‘Lady gets to choose the topic:
Goodness, truth and beauty in St. Thomas.’
Ah, lady mine, on goodness, truth and beauty,
Do we need St. Thomas, his instruction?
Our love of music and of libraries,
Your response to ‘April, come she will’,
When I sent a song at your request,
Speak for us, and then there was the rose,
Captured in the fullness of its light,
Which, shared with you, you wrote me, says it all.
Oh, then, I swear, I heard the angel sing,
If ever angels do these latter days,
The name of Rachael, high above the street,
Yet audible to me, alone below.
‘Angel’, that means messenger, correct?
Those messengers communicated meanings
Of such poignant goodness, truth and beauty,
That my psyche heard annunciation.
I walked for bread, but soared aloft for love.
No matter that you are so far from me,
That you exist, that we can feel such things,
Exalts me as no other love has done.
The sixth poem is called ‘Caesar, Antony, Osiris’. It centres on the figure of Cleopatra, but draws on Harold Bloom's writing about it, the late great Chicago-based literary critic.
Caesar, Antony, Osiris
This evening, as I read my Harold Bloom
On Cleopatra, your great avatar,
Or should I say, your Ptolemid prolepsis,
I was struck by his stark apodixis:
Without the fierce sexuality
That Cleopatra classically embodies,
And stimulates in others, there would be
No play to call. And so it's been with us,
Without your wantonness, your fierce longing,
I would not have been in play at all.
Her electric bed, the critic wrote,
That of Isis, as she dubbed herself,
Had harboured two young brothers of the Queen,
Then great Caesar, then Mark Antony.
But most of all, with her famed Roman lovers,
She famished those who feasted on her passion.
One could not get enough of who she was.
And so it's been with me, your would-be Caesar.
Rather, let's be clear, than Antony,
I want you in my Rome as Aphrodite.
Yet, actually for you, I've been Osiris.
You found me quite dismembered, out to sea.
You gathered up the remnants of my being,
Kissed them, breathing new life into me.
But you've been more than Isis, Cleopatra.
Witty, brilliant, irresistible.
Bloom would cast you as a Janet Sussman,
Not as plump and flat-voiced Lizzie Taylor.
Apex woman, utterly alluring,
Is who you are, for me, your risen poet.
Have I, then, been Osiris, sister soul,
To your desires, replenishing your being?
I've clearly not become your Antony.
Too wary of disaster to commit,
Too rational; though that could still leave Caesar,
If combined with great decisiveness.
But let’s stay with Osiris, brought to life,
Your poet, raised by your sweet ministrations,
For he transcended Roman generals
In what he gave to Isis and to Egypt.
Caesar gave us many lasting deeds.
Antony, post-Caesar, a fiasco.
Osiris, given your deep kiss of life,
Arose, like Dionysus, to the task
Of fructifying Egypt and the East,
Of journeying while Isis ruled the Nile,
Until he died, at last, to then become
The seneschal of souls and afterlives.
What you've brought forth, my vivid poetry,
May make that kind of seneschal of me.
We now have a long series of twelve-line poems, so they're short, they're sharp, and highly various. The first of them is ‘Red Ochre’, so in a sense it's a title poem. It's red ochre for the white goddess, and the one after it is called ‘The White Goddess’, so they're twin poems in a sense, and I'll read them one after the other.
Red ochre
Pale ochres have daubed walls since ancient times:
Yellow, orange, brown, sienna, umber.
But hematite-infused, blood-seeming pigment
Has lent its hint of life to human murals
From the Palaeolithic, down through time,
As the very colour of the goddess.
Neolithic burials, they say,
Mark out the figure of the Magna Dea,
With red ochre summoning rebirth.
In Gnossos it still rouged the singular
Goddess of the maze and double-axe,
Ancestral to Sinopian lip-gloss.
The White Goddess
I'm not sure what to make of Graves's myth,
His massive scholarship, his riddling claims,
That poetry as such is rooted in
The matriarchal cults of long ago,
Their worship of the fabled triple goddess,
In her guises: Death and Birth and Beauty.
I can't decide, if Apollonian,
Whether mine is truly verse at all,
Whether I can claim to be devoted,
Be it as a consort-sacrifice,
To the lunar goddess so conceived,
But you inspire a form of such belief.
One of the many poets whom Rachael has exhibited familiarity with is the Roman poet Catullus, who wrote only one book of verse and died at the age of thirty, rather like Shelley, but of consumption, not of a storm at sea. And one of the many dazzling things about Rachael is she's fluent in Latin, which I can't claim to be. So she can banter about Catullus or Ovid or many of the Latin poets.
This poem, Catullus 101, is just an attempt to capture the sense that we can live inside the world of Catullus. And one of the signature poems of Catullus, not an erotic poem, not a love poem, is one where he's lamenting the fact that he learned that his brother was dying when he was abroad. He raced back to get there before his brother died, but he was unable to get there in time. And so he arrived back and all there were was ashes. And so the poem is a kind of existential reflection on that, as it says, and its possible relevance to the relationship between a muse who is far away and her poet at the ends of the earth.
Catullus 101
Do you think it's faintly possible
that the music of a journey long ago
across the seas, traversing many countries,
in Latin verse that ends with atque vale,
could come to sing but also haunt our longings?
That, seeking me across those centuries,
having learned too late of my demise,
You might arrive for my poor obsequies.
Alight with love for this your brother poet,
To find no more than mutam cinerem,
Then offer me a vigil in your grief,
And weep, at last, for all that might have been.
The tenth poem is titled ‘Reading Epipsychidion’, which is one of Shelley's more famous love poems. It's a critical reflection on that poem and whether it still resonates in our time or whether it jars slightly coming from the high romantic period.
Reading Epipsychidion
It's strange, you know, that though we venerate
The poetry of Byron, Keats and Shelley,
We generally recoil from their excesses,
Their thys and thous and soaring rhetoric,
Such as Percy Shelley's Flight of Fire.
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.
Yet when I hear your panting living voice,
Murmur words of moist and ardent passion,
When I read the words you write to me
Or listen to the songs you cast my way,
I live then, Shelley's high romantic line,
I am not thine, I am a part of thee.
Poems 11 and 12 both have to do with the great German poet and polymath Goethe, Johann [Wolfgang von] Goethe, who among other things wrote love poetry, wrote erotic verse. And the first of them is titled ‘Goethe and You’, centring on Goethe's Roman elegies, which are erotic poems. The second, the twelfth in the recital, is titled ‘From Ovid to Goethe’. By this stage, Rachael was calling me ‘my Ovid’. And so I was linking these two references. Here it is:
Goethe and You
I wasn't raised to read erotic verse,
and never heard of Goethe while at school.
Sex was quite forbidden, and what's worse,
my parents hoped I'd be a holy fool.
If only I had read his Roman elegies
when bursting with the juice of life in youth,
Propertius too, and Ovid, all of these,
I'd then have had a different gospel truth.
Instead, conflicted, I lived with unease,
guilt-wracked and uncertain what to do,
hedging against sin and foul disease,
until I learned my Goethe and found you.
From Ovid to Goethe
Naïve erotic verse is classical.
It's what the free-willed Greeks and Romans wrote,
though even then sweet Eros clashed with order,
as Ovid found for writing Art of Love.
He was a kind of ancient Alfred Kinsey,
exploring how the Romans took their pleasures,
though he did so in poetry, not prose,
enchanting and enlightening at once.
But all such verse is best when breathed together,
as you and I both know and long to do.
And Goethe's finest work brought antique Ovid
into modern life, for me and you.
Poems 13 and 14 are ‘Bath and Trav’, followed by Ovid again, ‘Ovid on SMS’. ‘Bath and Trav’ draws upon Verdi's great opera, La Traviata, which is set in Paris, and Rachael was in Paris. And the opera is a story where there's a courtesan, Violetta, in Paris, and one of her clients, Baron Douphol, is wealthy and short-tempered and he wants to monopolise her. He wants her for his mistress, not just for the occasional frolic. But the other character, Alfredo, is a poet, and he falls really in love with Violetta and she with him.
And the question is then, well, what will she do? And so this poem, ‘Bath and Trav’, is about how Rachael and I discovered that, well, actually, we were in almost exactly that situation. And by the merest coincidence, the other man in her life, my rival for her love, was actually called Douphol. Here are the poems:
Bath and Trav
You called me, Violetta, as I bathed,
inspiring a rendition of Brindisi,
my sighing song of longing and passion.
Now I cannot bathe without the thought
that you are off in Paris with Douphol,
a jealous man of wealth and violent temper.
Ah, mia traviata, do not stray.
Don't say that our love has come too late.
‘Et tardi’ isn’t what I want to hear.
Tell the Baron that you love Alfredo,
That I'm your poet. He can be your friend.
That's where the opera's meant to end.
Ovid on SMS
Just suppose your Ovid had a phone,
and consequently didn't have to pine
or send his Tristia to Rome by boat.
He could call or text you all the time,
and, more important, you could send him love
in sexy voicemails, naughty messages.
That'd cut the distance down a lot,
and, frankly, stir the exiled poem's pot.
What say you, Muse? A good idea or not?
I'm teasing you, of course. We've both got phones,
and your bewitching voice, seductive notes,
are the air in which your poet floats.
Poem 15 is titled ‘D. H. Lawrence’, who, of course, became famous in the 20th century for writing books about sexual love and about women and sexuality, which scandalised the conservative culture. Lady Chatterley's Lover became a famous court case. Should it be censored or banned? It was a landmark case, because the court ruled that it couldn't be banned or censored, because it was literature. It goes as follows:
D. H. Lawrence
You've read so well. You must have read your Lawrence.
David Herbert, not The Seven Pillars.
And, knowing you, as rainbow, gypsy lady.
I imagine you've an eye for what's obscene,
what got his novels banned or expurgated
until the famous trial in 1960.
But here's what strikes me most at this remove:
Far more than Lawrence, you have stirred my senses,
rousing me from cold, platonic torpor,
encouraging the fire and passion of sex.
You make me feel I'm Lady Chatterley,
and you, her potent lover in the garden.
Poem 16 is titled ‘Genital Hypotrophy’. It's a wry poem. But it sends the effect that the artist of the early 20th century, late 19th century, Toulouse-Lautrec, was a dwarf, really. I mean, he was under five feet tall, but he had the reputation, at least, of having a normal-sized penis and a small body. He was known as ‘Tripod’ for that reason. So, this poem plays on that rather intriguing idea.
Genital Hypertrophy
Perhaps your thing's too large, you gently quipped,
Referring to a stalling SMS -
Then giggled by emoji straight away.
Would you giggle if, in fact,
I had the genitalia
Of Toulouse-Lautrec,
Whose nickname, Tripod, frankly says it all?
He was actually shorter far than me,
Eight inches so, I swear I tell the truth.
But not, I must confess, just genitally.
Heavens, that'd cause a girl to gasp,
To think me so much larger than the count.
Don't panic though, I'm well within your grasp.
Poem 17 is called ‘Cosmological Optics’. Among Rachel's many delightful features is she's got a very wide erudition. She's sometimes, however, given to strong opinions with which I don't agree. And in this instance, we're talking about cosmology, the nature of the cosmos. It goes as follows.
Cosmological optics
How do you view the cosmos, may I ask?
Or what on earth inspired your startling words:
‘Shut your mouth, you don't know anything’,
When I spoke of atoms and the void?
We really need to have a conversation
About first things, concerning thought and matter,
Not least the void which seems to lie beneath
The easy grace and wit of your demeanour.
Don't you know that I stand with Lucretius,
Or better still, with Einstein, Planck and Hubble?
The optics, looking outward, are quite clear,
But look within, for there you are in trouble.
Poem 18 is ‘Rommel of the Heart’, as in the German general in the Second World War, who was always famous for his campaigns in North Africa.
Rommel of the Heart
Erwin Rommel was quite undeterred
by cautionary principles of strategy.
His boldness at the front was legendary.
With his eye on Alexandria,
despite his patent lack of potent forces,
he threw himself at Cyrenaica.
I'm a bit like that, it must be said.
I'm prone to seize the moment, dash ahead,
hurling promises across the desert,
when I know the distant, glittering prize
lies just beyond a poet's Alamein.
Defeated once this year, I'm back again.
Poem 19:
Tall priestess
It has to be said,
you loom like Jerry Hall
over the little rock star
you seem to take me for.
What's not to like?
You've all her attributes:
Legs that go on forever,
Sexiness to up and die for.
Me? Well, that's another matter.
But if we took it quietly,
Poems, not smash hits,
It just might, just might work.
Poem 20, ‘Fucking to Wagner’. It was a boast Rach made in a candid moment quite early on, that she enjoys Verdi operas, but she enjoys fucking to Wagner. I thought at the time, whoa, that's a forward statement to make! So I responded, I take it by that you mean slowly, lyrically, and for hours at a time.
So here's the poem:
Fucking to Wagner
Your subtleties and glamour drew me first,
Your elegance and glowing blue-green eyes,
The hints that you were highly educated
And travelled to exotic destinations.
But then you sprang upon me, Straussian woman,
A wholly unexpected declaration:
That you, the golden girl with emerald eyes,
Were, sexually, ‘a Wagner kind of chick’.
You liked, you upped and said, with stunning candour,
Fucking to the sound of Wagner’s operas.
So there! And we were hardly yet acquainted.
Now I know you meant just what you said.
Poem 21 is titled ‘Kay Summersby’. It's pretty self-explanatory, so I won't give a homily beforehand.
Kay Summersby
Would you prefer that our discreet affair
Remain a matter only between us,
Assuming we ourselves are not forgotten,
As others quickly are, once they are interred?
Would or would you not want to be known
As the muse of my erotic verse?
There's precedent aplenty for concealment.
Here's one I just lately chanced upon:
Kay Summersby and Dwight D. Eisenhower,
Lovers, it would seem, in World War II,
Left so little trace of what they did
That even now historians disagree.
Poem 21. For those otherwise unfamiliar with them, both Dante and Petrarch were great mediaeval Italian poets. Dante was inspired by a beautiful young woman called Beatrice [Portinari], and Petrarch by a woman called Laura de Sade, for whom he wrote 300 sonnets in a form known ever since as the Petrarchan sonnet.
Dante and Petrarch
If Dante had received from Beatrice
Or Petrarch from the Laura of his sonnets
The SMSs you have sent to me,
How would those great humanists have acted?
How inflected their great poetry?
Boccaccio, I'd say, might offer clues.
Imagine Dante's Divine Comedy
With Beatrice anything but chaste,
Winking at the poet and enticing
Him to Aphrodite's paradise,
While Petrarch's endless vows of sublimation
Became a whirling dance of ecstasy.
Poem 23 is called ‘Amor recumbens’ It's a reflection on an incident when I was travelling on business. I woke up the first morning in Canberra, and the dawn light was coming through the window and shining on the big hotel bed in which I'd slept, which was all rumpled. I took a photo of the bed with the light falling on it and sent it to Rachael, and she came back straight away with the words, amor recumbens aurorae - love reclines at dawn
The sheer act of her doing that so quickly, so spontaneously, is one of many instances where I just thought, ‘This woman's enchanting!’ To respond like that and so quickly! So I wrote a poem:
Amor recumbens
The day draws down, and though I've been at leisure,
Nostalgia of the lips gnaws at my heart.
They long for you, for soft dawn light, the pleasure
Of kissing you in every tender part.
I've had three days of searching conversation
Over seafood, coffee, and good wine,
But all the while the visceral inspiration
Has been the yearning dream, would she were mine.
Love reclines in morning light, you wrote,
In perfect Latin, emailed with a kiss.
I've meditated since on that sweet note,
Imagined our shared auroral bliss.
And poem 24:
Garden of Pomegranates
Here within the garden of our love,
Against an old stone wall, there stands a tree,
An apple of Granada, multi-trunked,
Inviting contemplation of its form.
The sunlight of an afternoon of fables
Glows against its leaves and purple fruit,
That fruit which grows in countless ancient myths,
Rooted in the cycles of the seasons.
In ancient Greece, they say, it symbolised
The blood of young Adonis, mourned by Venus,
As Tammuz ws, a vegetation god
Brought back to life midsummer by her grace.
Poem 25:
Splitting the Fruit
We both of us, in truth, now face the wall,
where sunlight falls on richly laden boughs,
Empurpled fruit the object of our gaze,
Entwining trunks the semblance of our hopes.
Shall we, therefore, cut a calyxed bud,
And thereby hold our future in our hands,
Then slice the luscious thing to juice and seed
An emblem of a pact about our lives,
As fertile as the Punica granatum,
The pomegranate widely celebrated,
Especially when split, as I propose,
A rite of spring! A vision of pure passion!
Poem 26:
Kabbalah
Have you ever studied Kabbalah,
the mediaeval literature of signs,
of occult meaning overlaid on meaning,
reaching for creation in the hall?
According to that textual tradition,
the garden from which Adam was expelled,
with Eve, for tasting the forbidden fruit,
was a garden full of pomegranates.
The fruit itself, upon the tree of knowledge,
a pomegranate filled with seeds of fate,
The tree you have pointed to, is such a tree?
Our Kabbalah is all my poetry.
Some listeners will recall that the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers were massive leakages or hacking of secret documents from the offshore tax haven world. That bears on the present story and enters into the cycle of poems insofar as Douphol, the man in Europe whose mistress Rachael was, while all this poetry was being written, worked in that domain, which is not to say that he himself was criminal in any way, but that's the area. So, when the Pandora Papers came out, I was fascinated by the revelations. This poem resulted:
Pandora Papers
Is this, then, the world that you inhabit,
Having claimed we're here to kindle hope,
To bring alive the heartbeat of the nations,
A quest in which we're spiritually aligned?
His world is secret offshore bank accounts
In which three dozen well-known global leaders,
A hundred billionaires and ranked tycoons,
Celebrities and such have stashed their lucre.
Ah, sweetheart, let's salute the journalists,
The I.C.I.J. heroes and their sources,
Who brought to light this hopeless, heartless scandal,
And kiss each other in our secret places.
Poem 27 ‘You and the Parisian chicks’. Rachael indicated that she was thinking of getting her long, beautiful blonde hair cut short and to just have a bob, which she thought would be more fashionable in contemporary Paris. But what did I think, she asked? She said that both her hairdresser, a French male, and Douphol had flatly said, ‘No, no, no! You mustn't cut your hair.’ I felt the same way. And so I wrote this poem:
You and the Parisian chicks
I might have written fully thirty lines
in pleading for you not to cut your hair,
but time was short, so I cut to the chase.
You're thinking of a futuristic bob,
But also say that the Parisian chicks
Are envious and feel intimidated
By your countess hair and regal bearing.
That's fine for them! But darling, think of us.
We worship all that flowing, queenly gold.
Let the chicks with green eye think you haughty.
Let them fear the coming of the Hun! –
As their grandmeres did in 1940.
I was about to announce poem 27, and I thought, but it could be 28. We've been improvising a little as we go. So forgive us, if we've lost count. So let's call this poem 28 and cross our fingers. This one's called ‘Latin vocab test’, because I think I remarked earlier, Rachael, apart from speaking English, French and German, reads Latin fluently and will mock me at times about my deficient Latin. At one point said that she would subject me to a Latin vocab test just to see what I was up to. So I wrote the following poem, which is a bit risqué:
Latin vocab test
I have always been impressed that you read Latin.
It's one of many skills you plainly have,
And more than skills, an easy savoir faire
Concerning men and all things of account.
So when you said you'd test my Latin vocab
In the context of my going down,
Below Mount Pubis, there to sheath my tongue,
My brain lit up to think what I'll be shown.
I'm certain you will ask about the labia,
Ensuring that I know whereof I seek,
And that you would insist that Kleitoris
Means Venus, when translated from the Greek.
Poem 29. Among her many skills and attributes, Rachael is an equestrienne. And if, you know, if sometimes in these poems, some more than others, I come across as the more passive party, it's not an accident. I am. And so in response to her talk about riding horses and being the only girl who could ride a certain stallion, for example, I wrote the following poem, which has me aspiring to be her stallion.
Oh, to be your stallion.
Oh, to be your stallion in the wild,
A masculine and richly penised beast,
Proud to bear your weight and purposes.
You'd talk to me of racing with the wind,
Of being with you, creaturely and bold,
Of fording rushing rivers in the cold.
We'd make a centaur, unlike any other,
Since ever first the Indo-Europeans
Rode their steppe-bred steeds among the farmers.
The beauty of your rich and braided locks,
The flashing of your brilliant emerald eyes,
Would make Old Europe gaze on us in awe.
Poem 30 is ‘Losing Your Virginity’, and it's a humorous one. Because, to my surprise, Rachael asked at one point, ‘Do you want to know how I lost my virginity?’ Of course, I said, that sounds very interesting, and then she didn't do it. And so I wrote the following poem:
Losing your virginity
I really can't believe you lost it, woman,
This thing that's loosely called ‘virginity’.
Where can you have possibly mislaid it?
Could it be you put it in a box,
Or left it on a shelf between two books?
Perhaps you folded it and slipped it into
Your copy of old Kinsey's fat report,
Or dropped it by mistake out in the garden,
Among the Mr. Lincolns, as you pruned them?
Or possibly you cast it in the trash.
In any case, now, even if you found it,
It wouldn't be the slightest bit of use.
Poem 31: Porcino.
There's a story behind this which is worth sharing, because it's a very delightful story. Rachael, in character, will often ask me to look for something beautiful, or write her a poem about some exotic idea, whether it's pomegranates or some other theme from the classical world. And, on this particular occasion, she urged me to go out for a good walk in the sunshine, find something beautiful, and send her a photograph. So I went out for a walk, and I came across a beautiful white-limbed gum tree. And I thought, that'll do, that looks beautiful. So I took a photo of it and sent it to her. I was about to walk on, when I noticed that there was a great big mass of mushrooms at the foot of the gum tree. Without any particular idea in mind, much less what would eventuate, I just sent her that photo as well. And I said, ‘Oh, look at this, at the foot of the tree.’ To which she responded, ‘Ah, now you've got me lusting for porcini!’ - meaning pink mushrooms. Well, you can imagine what immediately sprang to mind. And clearly that was her intent. And she then texted me, ‘Write me a poem!’ Well, what was I to do? So I concluded my walk, went home, and I wrote this poem, about a singular mushroom, as it were:
Porcino
Mushrooms grow in quite unlikely places,
Not least the kind you like, those pink porcini.
And when they're taken, they leave subtle traces,
the seeds of scenes from movies by Fellini.
My pink porcino's growing, just for you.
Its vibrant stem is rearing from the grass.
Its rosy head is edible. It's true!
And so's the rest. Enjoy it with a glass
Of finest dry and chilled Italian vino,
At ease upon your country house chaise longue.
Enjoy the savour of this prized porcino,
Its flavour in your mouth, both rich and strong.
Poem 32 is titled ‘Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi’, which means ‘fortune or good fortune or luck, empress of the world.’
Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi
At dawn and dusk you loom on my horizon,
Growing as you've done for several others
Venus, Genetrix, and Hesperus.
Imperatrix, I came within your orbit
Long before your poet recognised
That equally you are Fortuna Mundi,
The lady luck or chance who rules our lives,
The empress of a world of randomness
Looked upon in hope by Homo ludens.
Your beauty and sidereal attentions
command the lives of poets as of beasts.
The latter dumb, the former fireflies.
Poem 33:
Dream Godiva
You volunteered that you were my Godiva,
But does that make me Mercia's Leofric?
Or do I have the fate of Peeping Tom?
Either way, I'd watch you ride through Coventry.
Your glorious hair, so long, so glossy,
Falling loose about your shoulders and your breasts,
Is for me the very stuff of legend,
The gift of God, as eyes on you agree.
‘Ego Godiva, Comitissa dieu’,
She wrote, it’s said, though churlish pedants quibble.
‘Istud desidiravi.’ Is that so?
Have you inscribed those words upon my heart?
Poem 34 is ‘The Siege of Tyre’.
For those who know Arrian's history of Alexander's campaigns, the Siege of Tyre be familiar, but that's a very small minority of people. So when Alexander the Great was conquering the Persian Empire, one of the cities that resisted him, in what's now Lebanon, was the Phoenician city of Tyre, and he had to besiege it and take considerable exertions to capture the city, which he eventually did by ingenious exertions and improvisations. I've used that as a metaphor for the long courtship between Rachael and myself. Who was besieging whom?
The Siege of Tyre
Famously, the rampant Alexander,
Defied by Tyre with its fleet and walls,
Built a mole extending from the mainland
Out against the Tyrian defences.
The Siege of Tyre, in that and other ways,
Was long and costly, but at length
It fell before the Macedonians' assault,
Was ravished and subjected to his rule.
Now, which of us is Tyre? Which Alexander?
I'd like to think my poetry's the mole,
But it could be this poet's Arrian,
His heart, the city, you, its conqueror.
We go from the ancient history of Alexander the Great to Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland with a poem called ‘Cheshire Cat’, the thirty-fifth poem.
Cheshire Cat
I'd swear at times that you're the Cheshire Cat.
Has that occurred to you in your retreat?
Smiling from your branch, advising me
That that way lies the Hatter, that the Hare,
And both are mad, as clearly I must be,
Or I would not have come to where you are.
You vanish like the cat, then reappear,
Keeping your faux Alice, quite off balance.
At times you vanish slowly, tail to snout,
Until there's just your smile, my pussy muse,
Confounding judgement, leaving me in doubt
Which way to go and even how to choose.
The next poem, which by my count is thirty-six, is ‘Oysters and Us’. It's another twelve-line poem, but it's from Wine on the Flames, whereas all the others have been from Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess, and it goes as follows:
Oysters and us
You say the world's our oyster, and that we
ill gulp it down in coupled ecstasy,
in all the ways ecstatic couples can.
I'll drink to that, my passionate companion,
And to all the wide world has to offer.
Yet my pairing with you is our world,
And it has been, for us, less all-consuming
Than the making of a priceless pearl
Within the shell that harbours who we are.
A foreign substance slipped beneath our mantle,
Which caused our oyster, in its own defence,
To build, from nacreous poetry, our love.
Poem 36, again from Wine on the Flames:
Parted petals
One alone of thirteen choice pink lilies
Has opened since I placed them in the vase,
Only one, and this one only when,
Or rather, let me say, only because,
You invited me to part your petals.
A naughty thought, before the sacred nones,
So you called this sensual invitation,
But that pink lily was suitably pious.
It delayed its opening up to me
Until after your three p.m. devotions.
Now it's Vespers, and we have the dark,
In which to contemplate the open flower,
The gorgeous petals of your pinkest part,
The secret longings of your floral heart,
The perfumed passion of your poet's art.
Poem 37:
The perfume of our lilies
This week, when I enter my apartment,
The overflowing odour of our lilies
Flows from the old factory of my love,
Who have requested my procuring of them,
As symbolic and as redolent
Of the dreams you nourish and my passion.
They have opened, as the week elapsed,
A week of convalescence for your Proust,
Your fond aesthete, your much-secluded poet
Brooding on the wars of humankind,
Lamenting your inevitable absence,
Yet elevated by your words of praise.
They're overripe and dying slowly now,
These emblems of our fine, imagined garden,
But it should not be thought that their demise
Will signify decay in our romance,
Au contraire, their perfume’s now preserved -
In your impassioned sighs and in my verse.
Poem 38: Petrus ninety-three.
The poem's fairly self-explanatory, but the basic situation is that Rachael told me of a wine tasting she'd gone to, in which she'd been offered a taste of a very expensive wine, called Petrus ninety-three, and it had been bold enough to swallow the whole glass, because it's a remarkable wine. Petrus wines in general are very expensive, and they're only made at one vineyard in France, in the Bordeaux region, so the poem reflects on what this all means.
Petrus ninety-three
It would have had to be from Aquitaine,
That glass of Petrus 93 you swallowed,
Slightly dry and rustic in complexion,
Classical, from fabled ancient ground:
A single vineyard, covering twelve hectares,
Where wine goes back as far as Roman times,
At Pomerol, just eastward of Bordeaux,
Exports such wine for thousands by the bottle.
You picked it out among six chosen wines,
And of them all you savoured it the most.
So far, in fact, you drained the glass of song,
Perhaps a thousand dollars' worth of red.
How beastly of the maestro to chastise
Your pleasure in the prized exquisite draught,
And relegate you, sweet sommelier,
To second place. He should have toasted you.
Oh, let me be your Petrus 93:
The glass you drain with pure, unfeigned delight,
In all my cherried, vintage poetry,
Distilled from dreams of you by day and night.
We'll conclude with two longer poems, the first of which is ‘Eostre, Whom I Worship’. The name, the word Eostre is the old Anglo-Saxon name for Easter. In fact, it's where the word ‘Easter’ comes from in more modern English.
Eostre, whom I worship
It's Easter-tide, Eostre, whom I worship,
An ancient festival the Christians stole,
Which rightly is the vernal equinox,
As Teutons reckoned it, before conversion,
Honouring the full ascendant moon.
You, Eostre, mock me as a pagan,
Wilfully ignoring all I've learned
Of your reduction from your primal glory,
By those who both exploit and deprecate
Your inner beauty, which I know so well.
So, if you now look back at your long life,
Before corrupting priests usurped your being,
Before the fall of Adam in the garden,
Before the shadow fell upon your Moon,
Where might you now find inflexion-points?
I am, you understand, your liberator,
Qua poet, the re-maker of old myths.
I'm dancing, now, before Ostara's altar,
Who would alter what they've made of you.
I'm singing you, Eostre! I renew
Your self-belief, the freshness of your eggs.
I'll paint them with red ochre for the blood
That, being Life you menstrually shed.
I'll roll them upwards, on the Hill of Time,
And play your paramour upon its crown.
But you, against this equinoctial promise,
Declare that you are merely Douphol's girl,
A trivial, subordinated woman,
Professing she's no goddess, but a prisoner
Of that beast's hypocrisy and dogma.
Our second last poem, the last of a few longer ones at the end here, is ‘Aeschylus and us’. Aeschylus, as most of you I trust will know, if you're educated enough to find the poetry we've been sharing interesting, was of course the first of the great Greek tragedians of the 5th century BCE. His [tragic dramas] helped to frame what Athens was actually all about, not least in terms of the rule of law instead of vendetta. I apply that to the question of my relationship with Rachael - and how could we regularise that, how could we make it something of commitment rather than flirtation.
Aeschylus and us
I have the incense burning on my table
As I sit down to write these lines to you,
An emblem of religious sacrifice,
Of homage to the longed-for morning star
Whom you became for me, these fifteen months.
But evening comes, O Hesperus, my love,
And other thoughts than passion supervene,
As your poet, cast aside at noon,
Now contemplates the lessons for the soul
Incumbent on us all in time and space.
The Oresteia, made by Aeschylus,
Performed throughout one Dionysian day
Before the seated citizens of Athens,
Encompassing the cosmos in its sweep,
Leaps now to my mind as meant for us.
The beacons at the start of Agamemnon
Signal to the brooding Clytemnestra
That he who'd sacrificed their Iphigenia
Would soon be unsuspecting in her hands.
Smouldering revenge is hers for Aulis.
Other fires close the trilogy,
The torch-lit quasi-marital procession
In which the poet has the vengeful Furies
Reconciled to democratic justice,
And dubbed the Kindly Ones on that account.
Could this not be our drama, my Electra?
Could I not be Orestes in your tale,
Companion, in the fateful resolution
Of anger issues that have dogged our lives?
Oh, come with me to Athens and the Theatre.
As a coda to all of those poems, we conclude with a sonnet, which actually is embedded in the foreword to Wine on the Flames. It takes its point of departure from Shakespeare's Sonnet 38, ‘How can my muse, once subject to invent?’ and is a reflection on what does all of this poetry and my love for Rachael and her feelings for me add up to, in the larger scheme of things, that is, in terms of our mortality and our lives.
Sonnet XXXVIII
Take, for instance, Sonnet 38,
‘How can my muse, once subject to invent?’
I feel as much, but fear that, soon or late,
You'll turn from me, your interest quite spent.
I'm certain I've written more for thee
Than Stratford penned for his forgotten muse,
And your delight in this gives joy to me,
Yet having so much bliss I've more to lose.
Suppose, in winter cold, my many blooms
Should go to seed, your pleasure in them wane,
Suppose thine own sweet argument succumbs,
What of our romance would then remain?
Some seven hundred roses dried and pressed,
Heaped around your place of final rest.