Folllow-Up: Glosa by P K Page

Often I don't like that genre of poems like glosa, where poets take a line or lines from another poet and develop them -- often I don't like it because in the end the original line seems better than the new poem and I wish the poet had just left the lines where they lay.

I do like the idea of poem as gloss, as commentary, response, unhelpful Pale Fire-esque footnotery. Just not the way they usually turn out.

This, however, I quite liked. It is Canadian poet P.K. Page's glosa on the poem I posted yesterday, Rilke's "Autumn Day."


Autumn

P.K. Page

Whoever has no house now will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone
Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening
And wander on the boulevards, up and down...

Autumn Day                       Rainer Maria Rilke


Its stain is everywhere.
The sharpening air
of late afternoon
is now the colour of tea.
Once-glycerined green leaves
burned by a summer sun
are brittle and ochre.
Night enters day like a thief.
And children fear that the beautiful daylight has gone.
Whoever has no house now will never have one.

It is the best and the worst time.
Around a fire, everyone laughing,
brocaded curtains drawn,
nowhere-anywhere-is more safe than here.
The whole world is a cup
one could hold in one's hand like a stone
warmed by that same summer sun.
But the dead or the near dead
are now all knucklebone.
Whoever is alone will stay alone.

Nothing to do. Nothing to really do.
Toast and tea are nothing.
Kettle boils dry.
Shut the night out or let it in,
it is a cat on the wrong side of the door
whichever side it is on. A black thing
with its implacable face.
To avoid it you
will tell yourself you are something,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening.

Even though there is bounty, a full harvest
that sharp sweetness in the tea-stained air
is reserved for those who have made a straw
fine as a hair to suck it through-
fine as a golden hair.
Wearing a smile or a frown
God's face is always there.
It is up to you
if you take your wintry restlessness into the town
and wander on the boulevards, up and down.


Source here

* * * * * * * *

Some T.S. Eliot in there, too, I think.

As you know, Steve, a glosa is a four-stanza poem in which each of the four lines from the old poem becomes the final line of a stanza in the new poem (Source here). The stanzas are ten lines long, and the six and ninth line rhyme with the tenth line. It is, my source says, a 15th-century Spanish form. Page's deployment of the form primarily signals to me that sometimes (maybe often) poets need a good hard kick start.

I liked these bits best:

night enters day like a thief

and

Even though there is bounty, a full harvest
that sharp sweetness in the tea-stained air
is reserved for those who have made a straw
fine as a hair to suck it through-
fine as a golden hair.

I'd have done without some of the repetition, though I like "Nothing to do. Nothing to really do." I know those days.

{rf}