.

What Sort of Freedom?

What sort of freedom is it that proclaims
Its export to the savage and demands
Oceans of youthful blood to back its claims
And wrests the first fruits from hard-toiling hands;

That foists debt’s yoke on children, hollowing
All human action with harsh usury;
That makes law of sweet falsehoods, silencing
The few who dare name what all plainly see?

Fattened, deceived, drugged, left to glut their lust,
With addled minds, hard hearts, and bleary eyes,
The half-unlettered many keep their trust—

Mere beasts. Where are you, men? A saner age,
A human nation would in rage arise
And hurl this farce down from its shaky stage.

.

.

Love’s Antithesis

Hatred is not love’s opposite: its flame
Darts forth to sear the charging enemy;
Love’s, hot within, warms outward, soft and tame.
Are both flames not but one felt differently?

The fires upon the altar and the hearth
Ignite those that consume the host, the wall
Arrayed against them. Far from hatred’s dearth,
True love must hate what seeks its object’s fall.

No! Apathy is love’s antithesis:
It holds no flame to light, to warm or sear,
But only cold, dark, still, mute emptiness.

And better to recoil from hatred’s fire,
To feel the life-blood stir from love or fear
Than languish in the void, fade, and expire.

.

.

To an Exhibitionist

How beautiful you are! You know it, too—
Why else would you bare beauty’s full display
To titillate the itch of gawkers who
See not your beauty but its form at play?

Such is the demons’ work: all they can do
(And yet they do it well) is turn away
Beauty from Truth to perish captive to
Mere fleeting, mortal passions, led astray.

Your beauty is no cheap commodity,
No pearl to throw before the grunting swine
Whose appetites consume you in the end;

It is yours solely, wholly, endlessly—
It is you, your own stamp of the divine,
Profaned as a lure for thought to descend.

.

.

Adam Sedia (b. 1984) lives in his native Northwest Indiana and practices law as a civil and appellate litigator. In addition to the Society’s publications, his poems and prose works have appeared in The Chained Muse Review, Indiana Voice Journal, and other literary journals. He is also a composer, and his musical works may be heard on his YouTube channel.

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13 Responses

  1. Margaret Coats

    “To an Exhibitionist” is a beautiful poem on the abuse of beauty. Each quatrain or tercet makes its own contribution to the whole, and to me, the sonnet turn comes with the final tercet. Lines 12 and 13 unexpectedly say that beauty is the person, in the full sense of that word (neither the body nor some attribute). Or maybe the turn is at the final line. Beauty as such cannot lower thought, but (this is implied) raises it to the divine of which it is the image. This is a reaffirmation of the link between Beauty and Truth from the second quatrain. A thoughtful sonnet, Adam, to be appreciated and treasured.

    “Love’s Antithesis,” with its creative development of the flame-and-fire image, presents a full picture of the main idea. Excellent use of poetic potential, as opposed to logical or argumentative.

    In “What Sort of Freedom?” the last line sums up all that came before as a “farce,” and even better, would hurl the performance down from its “shaky stage.” Well done.

    Reply
  2. Brian A. Yapko

    You have a haunting poetic style, Adam, which I find both beautiful and complex, warranting multiple readings. Of the three my favorite is “Love’s Antithesis” which renders into memorable poetry the idea that indifference, not hate, is the opposite of love. As Margaret states, the fire imagery is nicely developed. “To An Exhibitionist” is a marvelous exploration of the unspiritual aspects of narcissism. Am I right to read the first word of the last line “profaned” as “profanèd”?

    Your “Freedom” poem is so passionate and full of strong imagery that it gives me the sense of a volcano about to erupt. I wasn’t certain if you had a specific criticism of our freedom-loving government in mind, and it took two or three readings for me to grasp that your criticism concerns ALL of it — multiple indefensible counts of unmitigated rottenness. Well, I am very much on board with your analysis. Let’s shake that stage until it collapses outright!

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      I consider the “haunting poetic style” to be one of the finest compliments I have received. I am truly flattered. Thank you.

      The final line of “To an Exhibitionist” uses complex substitution: iamb-pyrrhic-trochee-trochee-iamb (in pentameter, with the effective sound of iamb-anapest-iamb-anapest). “Profaned” should retain its common pronunciation.

      You’ve pinned down “Freedom” perfectly, and I’m also glad to know you’re “on board.”

      Reply
  3. Daniel Kemper

    “Profaned as a lure for thought to descend.” This line struck me because I’m in a Lit Theory class and boy o boy do all the schools do just that profane whatever text they are aimed at.

    I agree with Brian Yapko’s volcano feeling and also Margaret Coats’ summary of that last punch with “farce.”

    In Love’s antithesis, I enjoy playing with types of opposition: direct/diametrical +1/-1, privative 1/0, complementary 1/[all other numbers], and so on. Enjoyed!

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      I would say that if you don’t feel like a volcano right now, you’re not paying attention. I’m glad I conveyed that sense.

      Good catch on the dialectic in “Love’s Antithesis.!”

      Thank you.

      Reply
  4. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Adam, you are so right to question “What Sort is Freedom,” regarding out present degraded social climate and the purveyors of perfidy. Freedom should never mean unleashing of the demons. From my graduate studies that included classes on logic, taking the most extreme view as a case in point, is a great place to begin. Does freedom give the right to steal or murder? From there one begins to understand there are some things that must be limited.

    The antithesis of love being apathy is a novel thesis that had never entered my mind, but with your poem, I am now cogitating on such a theory.

    I completely understand your position regarding exhibitionism. The worth of a person is not in the salacious presentation of the human body, but in preserving and demonstrating dignity and intelligence. The value of a person is found in how they relate to friends, relatives, and the public in their actions. Cheapness and lewdity degrade their value and lead to mocking, stalking, and devaluation.

    Reply
  5. Cynthia Erlandson

    Adam, your poems are always deeply thoughtful and artistically beautiful. These gave me the sense, even upon reading them the first time without catching all of the meaning, of being layered with truly profound thoughts regarding extremely important matters. I agree that they need to be re-read several times. I particularly love the way you’ve used changes in meter to strongly emphasize certain phrases, such as the three consecutive accented syllables in “Fattened, deceived, drugged, left to glut their lust,”; the two in “hurl this farce down…”; the three in “Hatred is not love’s opposite….”, and four (!) in “”But only cold, dark, still, mute emptiness.” The artistic way you’ve made these lines sound, perfectly emphasizes the thoughts’ meanings, and you always get very gracefully back to the iambs. Three very lovely sonnets!

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      An astute observation about the metrical variation. I’ve written before that poetry is a reflection of natural language, not a straight jacket to cram it into. But it doesn’t mean variation should be an excuse for sloppiness. You caught the nuances conveyed by reading, and that reassures me of my own judgment in writing. Thank you.

      Reply
  6. Joseph S. Salemi

    Three excellent sonnets, of the high quality that we now naturally expect from Sedia. He prefers the Petrarchan style, which allows for a more developed argumentation than some other sonnet forms.

    Having said that, and having read Margaret’s comment, I’d like to raise a question about the word “Beauty” in “To an Exhibitionist.” Part of the poem seems to use “beauty” as a word for the physical appearance of the exhibitionist — perhaps a stripper, a pole-dancer, or a flamboyant model. Or maybe it refers to a person of either sex who simply shows off publicly by demonstrating his or her skills or abilities. The octet suggests the first reading (a stripper of some kind), but the sestet is ambiguous.

    However, Margaret brings up the point about the separation of Beauty from Truth in line 8. This prompts remembrance of Keats’s famous line from “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” and calls into question the notion that the speaker is talking about the physical charms of a stripper. When Romantic poets talk about Truth and Beauty, they are typically in a dreamy world of abstractions and idealism.

    This puts us into the Platonic closet of trying to reconcile the physical beauty of existent things with some kind of invisible perfection that supersedes or outdoes it as an idea. That is, physical beauty is merely a weak reflection of some “higher” beauty in another world. And it reminds me of the words of Pietro Bembo in The Book of the Courtier, where he tries to argue that physical beauty cannot exist in a person who is interiorly evil and corrupt in the moral sense.

    Bembo tried to argue this, but it is a plain fact of human experience that physical beauty can be conjoined with the worst kind of evil. So my problem with the end of this sonnet is that it seems to say that the speaker is aware that the stripper is visibly beautiful, but nevertheless he knows that her behavior in stoking the crude lusts of her audience has no bearing on her intrinsically good and God-given character. If that’s true, then good for her. But I don’t think that it is necessarily true.

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      First of all, thank you for the compliments and the commentary. You raise an interesting issue with “To an Exhibitionist” that I did not consider. (As an initial offhand comment, I had in mind someone who goes much further than stripping — including the OnlyFans phenomenon — but the poem can run the gamut of narcissism.)

      My view in this is more Patristic than Platonic. The beauty with which the exhibitionist was created is good in itself, but abused to work evil — much as evil is not an independent existence, but a perversion of the good (cf. St. Augustine). By no means do I think that the outward behavior has no bearing on the intrinsic beauty; rather, the poem laments the abuse of that beauty, which is a creation of God.

      I think the problem of connecting outward appearance with interior goodness is inherently problematic (as it should be to anyone living in reality), and gives too literal a reading to the Platonic forms. Still, the form as an inadequate representation of the ideal bears out here: the abuse of the outwardly beautiful form for evil detracts from the beauty (at least to a morally sane beholder). Think of any physically beautiful woman whom you later learn has a history as a prostitute or has a particularly high “body count;” I think the beauty diminishes in the eye of the beholder. Or look at someone like Gavin Newsom, who for a politician is objectively on the better-looking end of the spectrum, but whose moral corruption transforms the well-groomed exterior into a facade of phoniness. (“Plastic” is a word I often hear.) So Pietro Bembo I think has a point – but only up to a point.

      I always enjoy your insightful analyses.

      Reply
  7. Joshua C. Frank

    My favorite is the first one. You sound as if you’re as angry about the way the world has gone as I am. I especially like the lines:

    Mere beasts. Where are you, men? A saner age,
    A human nation would in rage arise
    And hurl this farce down from its shaky stage.

    This is exactly why the powers that be have made the world as it is: to change us into milquetoast hive-dwellers, too weak and addled even to want to stand up against whatever they want to do. For this exact reason, they’ve done everything they could to destroy what I’ve encapsulated in one of my poems: “Large families, small communities, the Church/The simple country life for which I search.”

    Make no mistake about it, everything that’s wrong with the world is by design.

    Reply
  8. C.B. Anderson

    These poems are none of them easy reads, Adam, but once I had sorted out the rich syntax, the wealth of ideas embodied in your lines made the slight effort well worth it.

    “Love’s Antithesis” reminded me of the multiple-choice test I was given in grammar school (around 4th grade) where we were asked to match words with their antonym. When it came to “love,”i t was natural for me to choose “hate,” but the correct answer was “fear.”

    Reply
    • Adam Sedia

      Thank you!

      I’m not sure I agree with your teachers, and not just because of my poem. Can we love what we fear? God, perhaps. I know we can fear what we love. Just think of an angry parent as a child. As for hatred, the “love/hate” relationship has become a trope.

      Reply

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