Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

There’s a wide spectrum of relationships between poets and readers. Some poets write with a searing clarity, and some write as if daring you to make any sense of their poems. Some write poems so personal you feel like a voyeur reading them, while others obscure their personal feelings almost completely. And there are poets whose poems are not easily understood in one or two readings, but the extra work they ask of readers is well worth the effort.

Louise Bogan (1897–1970) is a poet who does require that extra effort. The 123rd anniversary of her birth is this month. She has been called a minor poet of the “reactionary generation,” derided as a woman writer, yet was frustrating to feminists, and has been lauded as one of the most accomplished American poets of the last century. She was never fashionable, largely ignoring free verse. Instead, she used rhyme, traditional verse forms and classical allusions, while making use of the less ornamented language of the 20th century.

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Bogan often wrote in the ‘voice’ of her protagonist – or antagonist. She was a reclusive and private person, wanting her work to speak for her, yet even when she is writing as a character, something of herself is revealed. In this poem, she writes about seeking refuge in intellectual pursuits, but being unable to escape from the emotion-bound body.

The Alchemist

I burned my life, that I might find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief. 

With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh —
Not the mind’s avid substance — still
Passionate beyond the will. 

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