The Lost Rooms of an Endless Conscience

Are we running out of time?

I was going to write about modernism being modernist and romantic in a certain way. About how choosing to be a poet, independent of space and time, is in itself a romantic quest. Simply the faith in the power of words to redeem or reconstruct the being, the faith in finding and expressing the language of the soul, is, in its essence, romantic. I see romanticism in Pound trying to construct an instantaneous vision of beauty. I see romanticism in Hughes, building up a voice for his people, with hope and belief in change. I see romanticism in Yeats not forgetting a deep sworn vow and in Owen when through images of death he reminds us all that war is horror and  has no resemblance with Dulce et Decorum Est. But then I realized that the soul is deep and endless and that words and poetry so too …. and I was running out of time.

So I decided to write about the images. Images, rooted in ancestral or subconscious origin, that connect us with the power of beauty that we all carry within. While reading the poems I could see the river connecting with other rivers, carrying our history and life, I could hear its strong and repressed flowing voice. I saw the petals on the wet black bough and felt the stagger and Leda’s surrender under the swans blow. I shuddered at the thought of a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, I saw the constellations of the past in the sky and the bones picked clean of dead man as one. I could see the circles and shadows of indignant birds as I could see flowers lift their heads to the blows of the rain and these images rising out of somewhere as if seeing them again. But once more, I was running out of time …

So what about time? Let’s think about the time it took the poets to find the word, the precise word to express their unbroken thought and sometimes broken soul? The dedication in finding words that represent the touching or the devastatingly real? The time for finding balance, and rhythm, and beauty  and line? The time to contemplate and think and see and feel and live and work, the time to stop and reach inside and then the time to reach out. The time to give us readers an extension to the limits of the mind, the time to give us their time.

So yes, eventually we all run out of time, the time we die. But death shall have no dominion if … Poetically Man Dwells …