Possessed by Memory by Harold Bloom

Author:Harold Bloom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

This morbid little splendor has a grisly charm and admits us to a curious kind of comedy. Here is a personal favorite, “Song of the Stygian Naiades”:

PROSERPINE may pull her flowers,

Wet with dew or wet with tears,

Red with anger, pale with fears,

Is it any fault of ours,

If Pluto be an amorous king,

And comes home nightly, laden,

Underneath his broad bat-wing,

With a gentle, mortal maiden?

Is it so, Wind, is it so?

All that you and I do know

Is, that we saw fly and fix

’Mongst the reeds and flowers of Styx,

Yesterday,

Where the Furies made their hay

For a bed of tiger cubs,

A great fly of Beelzebub’s,

The bee of hearts, whom mortals name

Cupid, Love, and Fie for shame.

Proserpine may weep in rage,

But, ere I and you have done

Kissing, bathing in the sun,

What I have in yonder cage,

Bird or serpent, wild or tame,

She shall guess, and ask in vain;

But, if Pluto does’t again,

It shall sing out loud his shame.

What hast caught then? What hast caught?

Nothing but a poet’s thought,

Which so light did fall and fix

’Mongst the reeds and flowers of Styx,

Yesterday,

Where the Furies made their hay

For a bed of tiger cubs,—

A great fly of Beelzebub’s,

The bee of hearts, whom mortals name

Cupid, Love, and Fie for shame.

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