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Out of Purgatory

There I went blind. I could no longer speak,
but as I died, I murmured Mary’s name,
And there I fell and left my empty flesh.
 
Now hear the truth. Tell it to living men:
God’s angel took me up, and Hell’s fiend cried:
‘O you from Heaven, why steal what is mine?’

—Dante, Purgatory 5.100-105

I went blind first, then not to speak;
The fate, so human, for us all—
Only my mind’s left to complain;
No words to say, but hopeless, weak.

And then, inevitable, death—
I died as everyone who lives:
What was the point, and why such pain?
If soon no more, why waste that breath?

Down to nothing, down to dirt’s floor,
And yet in one split-second, see:
There’s something ominous—again—
Which threatens to undo my core.

And then I heard, somehow, a voice
Say, in a way I hadn’t heard
Before thought’s full eclipse and drain,
One word: Linda—my true love’s choice.

From Not Lost (2021)

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Butterflies

They have been appointed and they must not
Deviate. Air, there for them, on they float.
They must in magic hoops be tracing loops
And landing on egg-shine greenery
In overt, covert shrubbery subtly.

They have been anointed—mission is a must,
And meaning so high above brown, brown dust.
They enter the eye in pure delight, yet
Their duty: turning beauty every way.
Return beauty forever, and a day.

From So Green, So Red (1993)

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Brooding

“O Spirit, that dost prefer…” —John Milton

It’s true, you see, the old Pythoness at Delphi:
Hardly she could see but with her inner eyes,
__And these were yolk sacs of poetry.

Ever since there’s been those who try to summon
Or finally admit they supplicate her demon,
__Whether white goddess or dark eidolon.

Materialists may imagine they’re computers
Whose collocations create words of power,
__But adepts know some spirit’s the conjurer.

____But which spirit is really master
__Remains the really, only problem after
______All: for versus her
________hear Christ call.

from The Other Side Collection (1985)

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James Sale has had over 50 books published, most recently, “Mapping Motivation for Top Performing Teams” (Routledge, 2021). He has been nominated by The Hong Kong Review for the 2022 Pushcart Prize for poetry, has won first prize in The Society of Classical Poets 2017 annual competition, and performed in New York in 2019. He is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. His most recent poetry collection is “StairWell.” For more information about the author, and about his Dante project, visit https://englishcantos.home.blog. To subscribe to his brief, free and monthly poetry newsletter, contact him at [email protected]

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23 Responses

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson

    The conjoining of spirits in “Out of Purgatory,” comes with the first glimpse into heaven of the one true love waiting. I believe in such an eventual meeting and your wonderful words reveal the dross that we must escape. “Butterflies” is a fresh perspective on their “mission” of bringing natural delights to the human eye. Indeed “which spirit” to whom one must listen is the eternal problem of mankind as you admirably juxtapose in “Brooding.” I added “eidolon” to my vocabulary! Three excellent poems worth pondering.

    Reply
  3. Brian A. Yapko

    Thank you for these poems, James. It’s really interesting and enjoyable to follow your poetry through the course of almost forty years and to see how, as a young man, you experimented with form and rhyme and that this has been a part of your poetic journey ever since. “Brooding” is fascinating in its use of language — I found those “yolk sacs of poetry” as well as the near rhymes of summon, demon and eidolon both intriguing and enjoyable.

    Of the three my favorite is your most recent: “Out of Purgatory” which places your on-going deep connection to Dante front and center. The rhyme scheme is quite unique as each stanza has the first and last lines rhyme, the third line rhymes with the third line of each remaining stanza while each second line is unrhymed and thereby figuratively cast adrift. The overwhelming effect of this form — at least to me — is of a speaker who searches and suffers and can only find incomplete and despairing answers until your speaker reaches the fourth stanza and finds his answer in the personage of true love. It is interesting that there is a theme of blindness and lost senses explored here and that the thematic “cure” is a person whose name (by coincidence?) happens to mean “beauty.”

    Reply
    • James Sale

      Thank you Brian for this: you are always so generous in your appreciation of other people’s poetry. I am really glad you enjoyed these poems, particularly through the lens of form and rhyme. Whilst we can – and I do – enjoy poems for their thematic preoccupations, discussing and noting form is always a more advanced mode of appreciation, especially appropriate to a site dedicated to the ‘classical’.

      40 years? Huh! Nothing – I have been writing poetry for 57 years, so it is gratifying that my more recent poetry you prefer, as that might indicate I am getting better – or more accurately, the Muse is more with me now than when I started! We all but hope so in our own individual situations. It is of course only through form that we can express beauty – and desolation, of a line adrift as you put it, can be beautiful in the context and contrast of the others.

      You are correct in assuming that I know that the word Linda means ‘beauty’, and as you possibly also know: is the name of my wife too. She is my Beatrice, only not idealised like Dante’s: my full wife and lover, not vision I saw briefly when I was ten. If you get to read my DoorWay – Paradiso, part 3 of The English Cantos – you will get to meet more of her. Thanks again,

      Reply
  4. Joseph S. Salemi

    James, the poem “Brooding” actually made me shiver with an inexplicable dread. It summons up the specter of demons, either in the traditional sense, or in the more modern variant of technological evil embedded in computers. The last line, with its mention of the call of Christ, adds a seriousness to the poem that makes the danger all the more threatening.

    I read “Out of Purgatory” as a love poem, but one that is suffused with the speaker’s suffering, and one that is rendered more intense by the last line (which uses the name “Linda” as something salvific, just as Christ’s name was used the the other poem.

    Reply
    • James Sale

      Dear Joe – I am really proud that the poem made the hardened, toughened literary critic called Professor Joseph Salemi ‘shiver with an inexplicable dread’ – I feel therefore that the poem has succeeded more than all the forces of contemporary inanity ever could! Thank you so much for those words. And yes, Out of Purgatory is a love poem (and love leads us out of purgatory as anyone who has experienced it knows), and as Buonconte found in his final devotion to Mary.

      Reply
  5. ABB

    In this first poem, we seem to have the theme of the English Cantos condensed into a single poem. The germ of your epic, James? It says 2021, but surely it was written before that?

    I love how the variety of internal rhymes in “Butterflies” mirrors the theme of returning—both within lines (hoops, loops), across lines (duty, beauty), and across stanzas (appointed, anointed). You demonstrate how little experiments in formality are so much more innovative than the total “originality” of the free-versers.

    Reply
    • James Sale

      Dear ABB – that is a very perceptive comment: Out of Purgatory first appeared in my Divine Comedies collection of lyrics from 2019 but was written in 2017, so effectively at the time I was contemplating The English Cantos epic, which was why I included it (again) in Not Lost as a prequel to the trilogy.

      Thanks for appreciating the ‘little experiments in formality’ – it is the only way forward! Greetings!

      Reply
  6. Margaret Coats

    Beautiful selection of perhaps the most important range of your work, James. “Brooding” suggests the varied ploys of persons who really haven’t reached the moment of becoming serious about the end. God help them if they have, and still consider a choice to invoke pythoness or demon or the white goddess or dark eidolon.

    “Butterflies” is angelic relief. Was it your humble, earthly way of beginning to write about angels?

    Reading “Out of Purgatory,” I think of what we are told to do if we have the happy duty of attending a dying person (so often the dying are left to those who care nothing for the soul, but merely record “expiration”). The sense of hearing is the last to go, and thus it is important to speak the Holy Name of Jesus close to the ear of someone who can no longer call upon it for himself. In your poem, after death, the sense of sight comes back first, but in an ominous way. Then hearing returns, and a voice is heard speaking a beloved name. That was a very brief purgatory in the third stanza, if the deceased is released by the fourth. But then, you probably don’t dare to explicate what happens, beyond the consoling imagination here.

    Reply
    • James Sale

      Thank you Margaret: it means a lot that you find this selection beautiful, since beauty is always what I am aiming for – alongside its exalted form, namely, sublimity. Brooding is about that choice we all have to make at some point. My original typography makes this even clearer, I think:

      All: for versus her
      hear Christ call.

      The ‘hear’ is exactly under the ‘her’, which accentuates the turn as well as the All/call rhyme.

      And yes, it is about angels and that delicate, indefinable presence that even the fragilest creatures here on Earth can somehow imitate angelic presence. I think it was GK Chesterton who said something to the effect that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

      You are right about the sense of hearing. I am hoping in my last volume of the English Cantos, DoorWay, to say much more about Linda and about the Paradise that awaits, given that no mind can imagine what the Lord has prepared for those who love Him. But still, I shall invoke the Muse as Milton and as Dante did and then – hopefully – we will see what we will see. Thanks again for your insightful comments.

      Reply
      • James Sale

        Ha!!! The formatting seems to re-adjust itself, so you have to imagine that the word ‘hear’ is directly under ‘her’, so that the line is completely divided. I will filler to show the positioning:

        All: for versus her
        __________hear Christ call.

  8. Monika Cooper

    “Butterflies” has so much chiming in the lines, and a wonderful idiosyncrasy in diction. I sometimes see them as missionaries too. It’s just full of white magic and the shimmering relationship between beauty and purpose, meaning, reason: mission.

    “Brooding” seems to be about the muse and which muse we choose to serve. I love the line about “yolk sacs of poetry.” The Pythoness is dark and frightening. I understand some of the sibyls prophesied Christ, although they remain spooky.

    I will write out copies of at least these two to study them more closely. They are all beautiful and all three in a oddly chilling way.

    Reply
    • Monika Cooper

      And is “Brooding” a curtal-sonnet? There’s certainly something Hopkins about the musicality of “Butterflies” too.

      Reply
      • James Sale

        Not strictly speaking, as Hopkins’ curtal sonnet was, if I remember correctly, 7 lines long, whereas this is longer. But – yes, it is Hopkins inspired as he is a favourite poet of mine, and you may remember if you have read HellWard and StairWell that I meet in respective cantos various poets in Hell and Purgatory. I am currently working on DoorWay, volume 3, my Paradiso, and I am not giving too much away if I say that one of the poets I encounter in Paradise is GM Hopkins and I am sure you will be interested in what he has to tell me, or rather the poet pilgrim of the story. Second, yes, it could be construed as a curtal variant of the sonnet, though note that its rhyme scheme is neither Petrarchan nor Shakespearean!

    • James Sale

      Thanks Monika. Yes, it has an idiosyncrasy of diction and also of syntax, which helps, I think, mimetically re-create the flight of the lovely creature. And too, the Pythoness is dark and frightening – we are all advised to beware of her awesome power, and I am glad you felt it in the texture of the lines. But I am relieved also that your find them all ‘beautiful’, for as I’ve commented above, beauty is essential in poetry; indeed, in life if we are to experience that deep joy that can only come from the spiritual dimension of our existence. Thanks again.

      Reply
  9. Cheryl Corey

    I was enchanted by “egg-shine greenery” and “… overt, covert shrubbery subtly”. The poem is as lovely as its subject matter.

    Reply
    • James Sale

      Thanks Cheryl – I love it when people get the intricacy of word play and grasp its mimetic effects. And yes, to Monika’s fresh tempera – some tree leaves – eg the laurel – seem to have that kind of artistic shine on them. Of course, the laurel, anyway, is Apollo’s! Thanks again.

      Reply
  10. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    James, from these three marvellous poems, it seems to me that you are a born poet who was destined to write HellWard and StairWell. Great stuff!

    Reply
  11. James Sale

    Thanks Susan – and to quote myself: Fate is what you get when the gods get you; destiny is what you get when the gods bless you! I feel, too, it was my destiny to write these things – the Muse came to me when I was 13 and has never left me since; only, it is also true to say, I have often messed up! Appreciate your warm comments, especially as you are a fine poet yourself.

    Reply
  12. Anthony Watts

    A welcome trio of contrasting poems. ‘Out of Purgatory’ is an account of (spiritual?) death overcome by love, the momentous event commemorated in powerful iambic tetrameters. ‘Butterflies’ sees a change of style, with Hopkins an obvious influence – all sorts of internal goings-on in this celebration of natural beauty and the ‘lightness of being’. Brooding is a more thought-provoking poem. Materialism is neatly disposed of, leaving an apparent choice between the White Goddess and Christ. True poets acknowledge the former in the shape of the Muse – and that includes poets of faith, like James. Are not the two, then, complementary?

    Reply

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