COMEDY
Following the style of T.S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I've attempted to create a dramatic stream of consciousness monologue. The linkages within the poem are psychological and chronological and as a result may not read entirely logical. The poem is slightly tangential and reasonably fragmented both in terms of style and content – much the way my mind works. I see this composition as a kind of arranged marriage of poetic forms whose forced union yields a slightly unconventional offspring.
Glenn Isaac makes a compelling argument regarding the subject of Eliot's poem. The work, he contends, is not about love at all, as the title implies, but is instead on the theme of suicide. With the epigraph taken from Dante's The Divine Comedy, and specifically the first cantiche, titled Inferno (Hell). The poem that follows this description of hell is dark and misery-laden...
With this in mind I set out to write a poem about suicide. I wanted to do it without saying the word, and without using the words death or die. The poem's rhyme scheme evolved out of this decision, and began with me writing out a list of all the words I could think of that rhyme with die. As well as forming the basis for the rhyme scheme, these words provide a visual confirmation that, yes, “die” is absent, and that there was in fact no death. Another element of structure within my poem is its stanzas. I chose to write in three line tercets, taking from the style of The Divine Comedy; but, rather than employing the convention of pairing this with a rhythmic arrangement, I chose to base the syllabic scheme on that of the Japanese Haiku: 5-7-5. This blending was a deliberate attempt to create something I hadn't seen before. The tercet structure of The Divine Comedy seemed an obvious match to the three line form of Haiku. Using these features (the rhyming words and tercet/Haiku structure) as a foundation, I then plugged my collection of words into the ideas and phrases of my story. A totally unintentional, but delightful, result of this formulation is that each tercet can be read as an independent poem. The amateur biologist in me loves that the poem can be read and understood at different scales, as fifty-five logically individual parts or as an interconnected, communicative, and re(in)formative whole greater than the sum.
The poem's title, The Wry Vignette of C.S. Toile, is an obvious take on Eliot's title. I refer to my poem as a “wry vignette” because it's short and slightly murky telling of recent life events which, only in retrospect, are ripe with painfully humorous irony. The name in the title, C.S. Toile, is a combination of my initials, because the poem is about me, and “Toile”: a reversal of the name Eliot, whose poem is the inspiration for this writing. I chose to begin my poem with an epigraph, like Eliot. I found a passage in The Divine Comedy that so well articulated the feeling within my own poem I could hardly resist using it. I translated the passage as follows:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Midway along life's journey I found myself in a dark wood, And there the path forward was lost.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte che nel pensier rinova la paura!
Oh my, how hard it is to say The nature of that wood, so savage, harsh, and strong The very thought of which renews my dread!
Tant’ è amara che poco è più morte; ma per trattar del ben ch’i’ vi trovai, dirò de l’altre cose ch’i’ v’ho scorte.
In fact, so bitter is it that death may be less so; So to deal with what I discovered there, I will recount only the good I took away.
Comments