The Potency of the Poet

I don’t know where I want to go with this,
But started anyway because I’m bored;
A sonnet's meant for love, and so a kiss
Might perk me up: So I'm now quite adored.
Within this poem, she is my slave for love
And I her lord, of course; she clings, I hold,
While cupids chuckle in their bliss above
And lofty cloud formations snake in gold.
I’ve gone for broke. I’m done. And she’s still here.
But this is still a poem. I’m glad of that.
I turn; and she returns to that place where
I pulled her body from. No need to chat
About her hopes or what we’ll have for dinner,
Which scores – at least, in this – another winner.
_________________________________________

Is this poem misogynist or misanthropic? It’s both, of course, and neither. For the misogynist is the brunt of Adam’s misanthropy.

Adam is a happily married man. He married his nurse. He used to be this man, a narcissist in love with his own misery, but here he, the man he was, is his muse.

Which I suppose is another form of narcissism. But there’s also the woman he calls to life. She is not only a fiction. She was an obsession. May, his wife, knows her quite well. She needed all her healing powers to cure him of her.

“I turn; and she returns to that place where / I pulled her body from.” This is, without doubt, the Orphean moment when Eurydice returns to Hades.

So we’re driven by deep forces here. On the level of the subconscious, the woman is the real woman of his neurosis, but he’s connected her with women from his unconscious: Eurydice, and at the point of orgasm, “While cupids chuckle in their bliss above / And lofty cloud formations snake in gold,” with Aphrodite herself, and therefore the Eternal Feminine.

So with an enemy as powerful as this – and she is an enemy, for she is prepared to yoke “her hopes” to his – the poet’s only refuge is the prosaic from which he ascends in the first quatrain and to which he descends in third quatrain and couplet.

His medium, poetry, therefore, is also just as dangerous. For when he writes, he calls into being those archetypes of which he is both enamoured and terrified.

So this is the engine of his life: In the centre is a magnet that turns when its two attendant magnets turn. On its right is the magnet of narcissism (+) and self-loathing (-), on the left that of the attraction (+) and revulsion (-) he feels for women and poetry. It’s the kind of contraption that pushes an electric car. And it’s why Adam gets up in the morning.

It’s no surprise that stillness characterises his moments with May. The Pieta not in marble, but in flesh and blood, in Adam and May.

Guy Barbaroux