The Sense of Poetry

(How would you feel if you had written this:

"I totally agree with the perceptive words of Groucho Marx, "Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs."

Only, it is not Groucho Marx, but Karl Marx.

Anon has pointed out that the Alexander for whom Bacchilydes wrote the poem is not Alexander The Great, but Alexander I, who lived hundred years before him.

I am grateful to Anon for this correction)

Recently I read about fifteen lines that were written by Bacchylides, who lived about five centuries before the Christian Era. These fifteen lines were all that could be retrieved from the ravages of time, the fifteen lines that follow these are mutilated, and the others entirely lost.

The poem, not really a poem, but the opening lines penned for a public performance in praise of Alexander the Great, who commissioned this eulogy, follows:

My lyre, cling to your peg no longer,

silencing your clear voice with its seven notes.

Come to my hands!

I am eager to send Alexander

a golden wing of the Muses,

an adornment for banquets at the month's end,

when the sweet compulsion of the speeding cups

warms the tender hearts of young men,

and hope of Aphrodite,

mingling with the gifts of Dionysius,

makes their hearts flutter.

Wine sends a man's thoughts soaring on high:

immediately he is destroying the battlements of cities,

and he expects to be monarch

over the whole world;

his house gleams with gold and ivory,

and wheat-bearing ships bring great wealth

from Egypt over the dazzling sea.

Such are the musings of the drinker's heart.

Further lines are lost.

Not remarkable, when you read these lines, they look a very ordinary preamble, though imaginative.

But consider Alexander the Great, not really Greek, but an eastern monarch who when the Persian Wars broke out, initially supported the Persians, and when the Persians seemed set to lose, offered intelligence to the Greeks: a double-dealer.

And consider that Bacchylides wrote this before that war, during the period when Greeks had grounds to be doubtful about Alexander. He had to praise Alexander, who had commissioned this work to court popularity with the Greeks. Yet, in the flux of politics when no one knows what the outcome will be, Bacchylides should not go overboard, lest his praises bring Bacchylides notoriety in the eyes of his fellow Greeks if Alexander should go out of favour.

So it is tempting to think what Bacchylides set out to say: is he praising Alexander for daring to dream a drunkard's dream, or is he subtly likening Alexander's dreams to a drunkard's delirious ravings?

When a poem suggests, and compels you to fill-in, then, I think it is successful.

Poems are not prefabricated material, you create them in your head: when they come alive, you realise the power and sense of poetry.