This morning on the Subst**k, Andre Demers (@triumphalpage) reads his "Hymn to Labour" (which is NOT about Keir Starmer). https://t.co/2dQPKDzd6o

I was willing to believe that Origen castrated himself. Now I'm not so sure. But why would Eusebius lie?

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Yet have I cried not out against his will, Yet have I not accused his cosmic law. Only to change this great hard world of pain A patient prayer has risen from my breast;" -Savitri's soul to Savitri, Book Seven, Canto Four

"I have borne the calm indifference of Heaven, Watched Nature's cruelty to suffering things While God passed silent by nor turned to help.

"When I was young I thought life all the sweeter That death was waiting to cut off my time; Death was the mother of beauty, the meter That gave a line a shape with its end-rhyme."

Frederick Turner's the Persimmon Tree (Gloria), part of Death Mass from Hadean Eclogues.. uses Stevens' phrase to fine effect.

Find these sonnets in Paradise, selected poems 1990-2003

Turner invites us to wonder to what degree he actually heard the words, delivered to him by the spirit of Will through the medium of his mind. The voice in Turner's sonnets is no faithful imitation of Shakespeare's, nor is the language Early Modern. But they are quite the feat

Turner says that a voice that he believed to be Will Shakespeare's communicated the sonnets to him. Poets have a special license to hear voices (and they may share about it without being deemed mad), but also to deviate from the truth.

The theory is that he faked it by declaring himself dead and having a funeral, and changing his name from Shakespeare to Arden, because he was ashamed of his father.

Since there's a Hamnet movie coming out soon I find it suiting to recommend the Sonnets to Hamnet of the late great Frederick Turner. The poem poses the dubious hypothesis that Hamnet did not die in 1596 but lived and faked his death.

Browning's Sordello seems less difficult today than in its time when it hurt Browning's reputation. It is the same with Moby-Dick, with Dickinson, Blake, and Keats. To paraphrase Emerson: great works have to wait to find the readers they deserve.

Their meeting is the triumph of will over reason, of the idyllic over the opulent, of time over eternity. It marks a moment of concretization in a work that waxes abstract for hundreds of pages. The reader wonders if there are such climaxes still in store in it. There are..

It cannot help but seem rehearsed, because it is, reimagined endlessly in a Romantic imagination that tracks the origin of souls to the creation of the universe, a la Yeats' "Face I had / before the world was made."

Here is the virtue of profound naivete and recklessness. Satyavan leaps immediately into the mode of the most mellifluous and obsequious courtship, and sustains it for pages until Savitri's hand is assured.

The popular if somewhat mythical notion of love at first sight is more compellingly than ever portrayed in Book Five, Canto Three of Aurobindo's masterwork. It is a culmination that hundreds of pages lead up to, and its use of the monological dialogue is a rare delight.

"You will see Hogg,-and I cannot express His virtues,-though I know that they are great, Because he locks, then barricades the gate Within which they inhabit;-of his wit And wisdom, you'll cry out when you are bit." -Letter to Maria Gisborne, PBS

Many thanks to @AlexRettie at @PoemsforPOI for posting my Hymn to Labour for September's Poems of Work Contest. It was a great pleasure to write this one.. https://t.co/ZeBVLN3vya

A new poem by @triumphalpage on @PoemsforPOI this morning: