"Eros" by Robert Bridges

Versecraft

The missing word at 23:18 is "ironically"
Topics discussed in this episode include:

-My thanks to Heights Arts for the feature!

-Hopkins and Bridges: name a more iconic duo.

-Sprung Rhythm vs. Syllabics

-Bridges' whacky work of logometry, Milton's Prosody

-18th century in the streets, 19th century in the sheets

-Iambic tetrameter couplets and the Hallmark effect

-No more unqualified ahistorical scansions! Mea culpa.

-Robbie's vision of elision

-Congrats! It's triplets.

-Polytheism is the deification of allegorical thinking

-Eros only wants one thing, and it's disgusting

-Not in my good Christian poem!

-To be pagan is to be unconscious of fallenness

-A terrifying force of nature has never been sexier

-The raison d'etre of Anna and Emma

-Eros and Psyche

-It's all more and less than you think.

Text of Poem:

Eros

Why hast thou nothing in thy face?

Thou idol of the human race,

Thou tyrant of the human heart,

The flower of lovely youth that art;

Yea, and that standest in thy youth

An image of eternal Truth,

With thy exuberant flesh so fair,

That only Pheidias might compare,

Ere from his chaste marmoreal form

Time had decayed the colours warm;

Like to his gods in thy proud dress,

Thy starry sheen of nakedness.

Surely thy body is thy mind,

For in thy face is nought to find,

Only thy soft unchristen’d smile,

That shadows neither love nor guile,

But shameless will and power immense,

In secret sensuous innocence.

O king of joy, what is thy thought?

I dream thou knowest it is nought,

And wouldst in darkness come, but thou

Makest the light where’er thou go.

Ah yet no victim of thy grace,

None who e’er long’d for thy embrace,

Hath cared to look upon thy face.

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My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight
Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug
List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)