grassmonk.net

The poem in question: Inner Betrayal

Ah, the final poem of 1996. I want to like this poem. I really do. This is a very personal poem to me, but I just feel that it is horribly written. The meter is all wrong, the rhyming is okay but feels forced, and the ideas just don’t flow together very well. In looking over my various copies of this poem, I find up to four different versions of parts of it. This seems to me to emphasize how much I struggled to make this poem work, but it doesn’t seem to have ever come together as I had hoped.

But all is not lost! It was not too long after I first tried a Poetism Redux that I made an attempt on Inner Betrayal, which I will share at the end of this entry. Apparently I still had such strong feelings for how important this poem is and how it needed improvement that I went to it almost straightaway after my first Redux (well, as straightaway as eight days can be considered).

As far as the poem itself goes, the story is straightforward and easy to follow, though by my reading, the final few lines seem to be a bit disconnected from the rest. (And I’m the one who wrote it and knows what I was talking about.)

This poem is about someone who is hiding a secret that he is ashamed of. He knows that he’s done something wrong, but he doesn’t want to admit it, not because of fear of punishment, but because of the shame and embarrassment. I suppose in that light, “unspeakable” may be the wrong word to describe the ill he performed. In any case, he doesn’t want anyone to know.

Then

emotion intervened and made guilt persevere

and he realized he had to get this weight off his chest. There was no alternative if he wanted to feel like he could truly be acceptable to other people. So he started the long, difficult task of repentance and restitution. He struggled long and hard, sometimes wondering if his efforts would all be worth it. After a while he thought he was doing well enough, and instead of keeping up the fight, eased off a bit, and oops! Suddenly he was right back down where he was before; maybe he was even lower.

Not quite understanding how he had fallen so easily, and embarrassed that he had fallen, he decided not to make as valiant an attempt to recover a second time. He essayed a devil-may-care exterior to hide his chagrin, and eventually discovered that by pretending all was well and nothing needed fixing–while continuing his aberrant behavior–he was removing himself further and further from help and recovery. It would not be impossible, should he try again, but it would certainly be much, much harder the longer he let it go.

It is somewhat ironic is that I can clearly remember the real-life details that inspired this poem, but I cannot bring myself to describe them more clearly than I have in this commentary.

Now I’d like to point out the differences in the various copies of the poem I have lying about. To make it easier to follow, I’ll note the differences as compared to the version published on this site by referencing stanzas and line numbers, e.g. (2-5) represents stanza 2, line 5.

Handwritten copy

(1-3) He kept it unrevealed for a year or two
Till it nearly mastered all his will.

(2-6) And was troubled no more for a time.

(3-3) For a long time he hid behind his mask

(3-7) He’d forgotten how to respond to care
While trying to rationalize self-wrought pain.

Electronic copy 1

(1-4) Until it nearly mastered all his will.

(2-3) He oft thought it wasn’t worth the effort to return;
The process seemed of interminable length.
Then he thought he mastered the cause of the ill
And troubled no more with it for a time,

(3-1) For a while thereafter he was puzzled and confused,
But he placed confusion behind insincerity.
For a long time he hid behind his mask

(3-5) He remembered things that had caused so much grief
And then a thought of horror entered into his brain:
He’d forgotten how to respond to those who cared for him
While trying to rationalize his self-wrought pain.

Electronic copy 2

(1-7) When emotion intervened and made guilt seem so strong
That he felt no one could do anything worse.

(2-2) And took very nearly every ounce of the man’s strength.
He often thought it wasn’t worth the effort to return;
The process seemed of interminable length.
Then he thought he mastered the cause of the ill,
And troubled no more with it for a time,
But letting down his guard proved somewhat fatal,
And he fell down the other side of the arduous climb.

For a while thereafter he was puzzled and confused,
But he placed confusion behind insincerity.
For a period of months he hid behind his mask,
‘Til a vision of the past hit with startling clarity.
He remembered bits and pieces that had caused so much grief
And then a thought of horror entered into his brain:
He’d forgotten how to respond to those who cared for him
In his effort to rationalize his self-wrought pain.

It’s interesting to see that more than two-thirds of the lines of Electronic Copy 2 contain (sometimes quite) different wording, as do just under half the lines of Electronic Copy 1. The handwritten copy is the most similar, with less than one-third of the lines differing.

The difference prize, however, goes to “Inner Betrayal Redux,” which I shall now unveil for your reading pleasure. It’s dated October 10, 2006–almost 10 years after the original (whichever of the four versions is the original, anyway).

I knew a man upon a time, not too long ago,
Who hid within himself his crimes and ills.
He kept them secret, unrevealed, as long as he could go,
And sometimes tries to keep them, still.
He tried to keep the pain away that feasted on his soul
While feeling every moment he might burst,
But emotion intervened and guilt swooped down to kill
And he felt that no one else could have it worse.

He made his restitution, best as he knew how;
It took him nearly every ounce of strength.
He often thought he should give up, unworthy to return,
And the process seemed to be of endless length.
A time passed, and he thought he was now master,
And was troubled no longer–for a while.
He avoided constant vigilance
And fell back down his arduous climb.

He now was only puzzled and confused,
But clothed himself in insincerity.
Again he hid behind his mask
Until vision came with startling clarity.
Suddenly, things that caused him so much grief became so clear,
And a new nightmare came into his brain:
He could no longer respond to others’ care
Because he sought to justify his self-wrought pain.

I think “Redux” starts out strong, and begins to stumble on the meter in the second half. Some of the rhyming is still a bit forced. However, overall, I think it is a great improvement over the original (any of them) and I think I can finally say that I am nearly satisfied with this poem.

The poem in question: Power

This is the second in my Famed Trilogy (so named, just now, by me) of Ignorance, Power, and Abdication.

My Paul Simon influence can once again be spotted here, as the verse style was patterned after the song "Save the Life of My Child," though the meter and rhyming points ended up being somewhat different. The surface-level subject matter–suicide–is even the same, though I suspect the motivations behind each are also somewhat different.

This poem is about a man who has gone mad with power. (Oops, I guess I gave away the ending.) However, it is not the all-to-familiar scenario of someone trying to amass all the power he can to be some supreme ruler or some such; rather it is someone who, little by little, bites off more than he can chew, time and again. He eventually discovers that he is seemingly incapable of handling all that is now in his life, and something has to give. Rather than continue to maintain his illusory façade (yes, I know that’s redundant, but darn if it doesn’t sound cool), he finds no alternative but to end it all. Interestingly, a part of him also believes that greater part of fault lies elsewhere than with himself and his foolhardy choices:

The sadness in his heart was but a tiny part
And much more than he felt that he had earned.

Even more interesting, to me at least, is the original version of those lines, which is:

The pressure building up was beginning to tip the cups
And fill up the urns.

The metaphor I was trying for was something about a cup of life being emptied, with death slowly taking over. I decided the metaphor was too oblique even for me, and ultimately changed it. I do think that it fits the contents of the second stanza better, and that the finished lines provide better accompaniment for the first stanza.

As I have re-read this poem over the years, I have never really liked the "mighty lake" of the third stanza. It just doesn’t seem to fit, though it does go well with the line

To wash away his bleak mortality.

I never could come up with a suitable change for the line, so I just left it. As I have been studying this poem while writing this commentary, though, I noted something that I don’t think occurred to me before: it was after he saw the "mighty lake" that

He decided then to leap from the barren, wasted peak

I think a part of him thought there was a possibility of surviving his fall if he fell into water, and so that gave him the "courage" to actually go through with his suicide. That is how I will now justify the line to myself.

The interspersing into the poem of the line

Ignorance can be damning but power can be maddening

is obviously modeled after the similarly used style in Ignorance. The two poems are not really related except through this line, and I suppose that without having read the first, the reference in the second makes little sense. However, out of the 0.26 people reading these commentaries, the odds are that at least 0.18 of them will read both poems–possibly in order–and those are numbers I can live with.

The use of the word but in the line does beg the question whether madness is worse than damnation. I won’t comment one way or the other here, but will attempt to talk about it a little bit more when I get to the commentary for Abdication. That’s called a cliffhanger, and will bring my 0.049 readers back for more.

Overall, I like this poem, though it is a little rough around the edges. It will probably be subject to an entry in my Redux series whenever I get around to it, but I am not embarrassed by it, and I suppose that is saying something, alien in tongue though the saying may be.

The poem in question: A Whisper

There’s not really a lot to say about this poem, but what I said in my last commentary seems to apply pretty well:

The only thing that I can remember about writing this poem is that I wanted to write something. I needed to keep up the streak, even if the end result didn’t turn out as I hoped. I don’t remember what I was writing about then; I’m not sure that I even had anything specific in mind. Possibly I was just putting some words down that I thought could convey some message of which I was unaware.

One thing is for certain: this poem is not very good, and doesn’t really mean anything. (I suppose those are actually two things.) It seems to me that it was written somewhat like Pretense, i.e. I wrote down the first words that came to mind, as quickly as I could, and called it good. I like to keep things like this around so I have something to look at 10+ years later and have a good chuckle at myself.

That is all. Up next (assuming I don’t take another long break in writing) is a hopefully more interesting commentary about a hopefully more interesting (and better) poem. Stay tuned!