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Prodigious Dreams
Let not these Autumn notes lead you amiss.
Autumn, indeed, is come (the signs are all
around). This aging empire wanes, its fall
accelerates: decay effects abyss.
Our Winter now approaches, precipice
we didn’t foresee. Our legacy? A squall
that confiscates our children’s wherewithal!
Still, as we die, love, let’s embrace, and kiss.
Prodigious dreams will keep our progeny
alive; though hard beset, they’ll learn to cope,
and, in old age, find life is Vernal-tinted.
And generations hence will oversee
prosperity, and dwell in Summer’s hope—
that fragile, fleeting dream our childhood hinted.
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Stately Elders
Sad Hero welcomed death: the winter gale
had swallowed her Leander. Thisbe yearned,
till hope was by a lioness overturned.
Troilus, sad Troilus: hear his stricken wail!
Tibullus found pure love could not prevail;
they fled from Wyatt; Sidney’s furnace burned;
Daniel, Catullus, Drayton, Yeats were spurned.
Who but a fool would love? To what avail?
Two stately elders grace our spare expanse;
their branchlets, twined, caress and sway, impelled
by summer’s aether: splendid pantheon!
Just so, our naked souls embrace and dance
in light that breathes within: our spirits meld!
Love, you’re my Baucis; I’m your Philemon.
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Notes
Hero and Leander: young lovers separated by the Hellespont. Each night Leander swims the strait to be with Hero, guided by a light she keeps burning. One stormy night Leander drowns. Hero dives into the waters, clasps Leander, and drowns.
Thisbe and Pyramus: young lovers separated by a wall. One night they plan to meet secretly in a garden. A lion appears and Thisbe flees. Pyramus finds Thisbe’s bloody scarf, assumes the lion killed her, and kills himself. Thisbe returns, sees Pyramus die, then kills herself on the same dagger.
Troilus: a Trojan prince who dies in the Trojan War. He loves Cressida, who leaves him, going over to the Greek side in the war.
Tibullus (55 – 19 BC) and Catullus (84 – 54 BC): Roman love poets.
Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 1542), Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586), Samuel Daniel (1562 – 1619), and Michael Drayton (1563 – 1631): English Renaissance poets who wrote important love sonnet sequences. “They Flee from Me” is a famous Wyatt poem; Sidney calls his “boiling breast” a “dark furnace” in Astrophil and Stella Sonnet 108.
William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939): an Irish poet whose marriage proposals to Irish Nationalist Maud Gonne were repeatedly turned down.
Baucis and Philemon: an elderly couple whose request to the Gods that they die simultaneously is granted: at the end of their long lives, they metamorphose into intertwined trees.
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Kevin Farnham lives in Northeastern Connecticut (“The Quiet Corner”). His poetry has appeared in The Lyric Magazine. His book “Twelve Sonnets: A Defense of Spirit” is the beginning of a long sonnet sequence titled “The Autumn Sonnets.”
“Prodigious Dreams” is a fitting follow-on to yesterday’s poem about children being stabbed in the UK, as written by Susan Jarvis Bryant. You place hope in coping, that would be needless except for the heedless. In “Stately Elders” you pose an interesting question at the end of the first verse, “”Who but a fool would love? To what avail?” This is saved in the second verse by the “melding of the spirits.” These are two poems with a message from the past for the future.
Thank you, Roy. I am less optimistic now than I was when I wrote “Prodigious Dreams” 12 years ago. I mean I now think the upcoming decades will be darker than I thought they’d be back then. But love ultimately counters all emptiness.
What beautiful sonnets! I, too, am rather obsessed with the seasons, and Autumn is my favorite. Both of these poems are very poignant; “decay effects abyss” is such a profound phrase (and I love the amiss/abyss rhyme, too). In the second poem, I especially love your description of the branches twining about each other lovingly.
Thank you, Cynthia. Autumn is an organizational theme for my work in this autumnal season of my life. I find, though, that “autumn” seems to be everywhere we look today with respect to society and Western Civilization. So much of the poetry published here reflects that decline, and the efforts of individual spirit to counter that. Autumn should be a time of harvest, not mere decay.
“Prodigious Dreams” is a good example of a rare all-seasons sonnet, with the unusual turn of a wintry kiss. Splendid generational flow in the sestet–and though you, Kevin, may have a less optimistic view than when you wrote it, it well reflects the ever-surprising summer hope of the young. I see it again and again in grown children and former students who take a bright view of work in unpromising situations–enough so that their elders can find life vernal-tinted after all.
You are undoubtedly correct, Margaret. As we age across decades and perceive the same dark clouds continuing to approach, deepen, and infiltrate societal reality ever more insidiously, it is very easy to lapse into loss of hope. Yet, for the young (who will often blame their parents for creating darkness that the parents merely endured) the starting point is whatever is today. Yes, I should take my own poem more seriously and know that it somehow must be as true today as it was when I first conceived it. Thanks for that kind suggestion!