/ To Lynn Shepherd,
An author of "Treacherous Likeness",
A book me-read in feeling of unexplanable regret /
"THE TRUTH OF SHELLEY'S GHOST"
A Shade - there's the dark echoing: -
"Of a noblest kind!" - slides in,
All silent, pre-materialized.
There can be seen no eyes
Of maid surprised, no scene
Of fatal cries. A monster
Felt from high-po^etic stars,
He swam across the sea of Death,
And after seven lives of storm
His ugly look (is) a dumb eloquence.
Much peaceful though. The light-rays
Seem are not to aggravate the lines
On his still brow, so 'tis like now
As he tries his light-way back.
Envoked to face the old dream's wrack.
Within the Rumours House, frank
He steps, in corridors of Lie.
Those specks of crystal life guides
Him to th' rooms of otherside Crime;
With manner of the dead he comes,
In manner of a gone-bye stays
There by the frame of glass -
Infernal entrance. - Sweet diable waits,
Envoker of the burn^ed tails:
Intrigue - prist^ess of ache'n shame -
She ought to do him welcome.
In her service, that a sucrifice
To make for him, to annimate
His vague self. - Abandoned Shade!
Be fed thou by (a) sacred essence
From the most luxuriant Hell!
And can't thou see these gazing Sins?
Not of the most devoted they
Are seen and bloodsome to be yours?!
Have a liquid life from them, be-shared:
One fear relatives they [*1]. -
A sad guest. He sees around her
The sights of lunarcraft there -
Depraved Gossips 'bout a "lost face"
Has their fun, and, 'tlike some Mass on,
The naive and sensitive in their will.
The loves too sweet are to be killed, -
They laughing?... - "Dear murderer,
You gibbet's libertine, kid-knot!
Are you proud not? We yours, yours!"
They're giving their life-drops; praise;
And as he yet can't tell his Fate,
She pours some magic upon glass;-
There, in Diaboli's circle dark, [*2]
O'er the border of reflected Doubt,
He realize...he stands himself,
His awkward figure, and his face,
As if from ashy rhyme arisen,
Different to them. But what's that shape? -
His ugly look where has gone?!...
He sees in his reflection's eyes,
Would be that Ferro Luxe [*3] from, those sparks
Of starry soul; and no ruined
Grace, no aught of damned lines
At all - a vision of clean Youth,
Delightful, poetic, but...feared, so.
Feared of (a) doomed self, of diable's call,
Betrayal of the Past?... Reflections
Quite can be confused, when meet they
In the glass of Times their part,
Their lasting life. - That fears...
Though the feared (is) facing Fear leaves;
A silent visitor steps back;
His Future saw its Shade from dark,
And he's to keep the path. And...
Yes,... as like the timeless echo-thought,
The other side of Air there spells, -
Whilst his eyes back to kiss his boat
Far let be flying through the ends
Of the blind dream of Life's Ghost; -
He can hear: - "He's with us... Amongst..."
/25.01.2015 - 03.03.2015;
Moscow dacha by S.Posad /
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P.S. - This poem far is not a representation or any kind of interpretation of
Lynn's fictional scenario with that a strangest Shelley's Henry of hers,
and my idea, in these lines, was but of a sort of an author's trying to picturize
that possibly-objective "tet-a-tet" contact just between a Poet and his famous
paranormal Ghost, - and, so, between the times of them too: between the Poet's time
with its past and future, and the Ghost's time with its past and future indeed, closely
to our measures, - however, we may know about, that was a sort of result of
that mental distortion happened to be in a cause of all the perfidy and columny,
which Shelley, in his life, have always been a victim and an arbitre of, and which
was so impressively performed in Lynn Shepherd's inventional book.
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The Notes: -
*1) - here, in this part of a poem, I'm bringing the drops of archi-
hellenic knowledge about that mystical ritual, what must to be the "envoking the
shade". Homer in his "Odyssey" explains it perfectly in the Songs 10-11.
There exactly are the words about the giving blood to a shade; and that image,
symbolically, I've used in my allegoric lines. (As we remember, Shelley himself too,
in his poems, quite often used to send his reader to a sacred meaning of the "blood
and blood-sharing", whether in social or sexually-mystical context of his
poetic works.)
*2) - I'm using the word "diaboli" here in proper hellenic meaning of it,
what means "columny" or, other way too, simply the "judging".
*3) - Luxe Ferro, the "Highest Light", and so Lucifer - as we know, is a
name of a brightest star in the Sky, like that for ex. in Ovid, and which now days
called simply as the Polar Star. - The Shelley's Ghost was originally picturized in
image of a starry-eyed dead. That's how my Shade can see the reflected sparks of
starry-light in the eyes of ourside-live Shelley.