Delphine

“Man’s most valuable faculty is his imagination” – Germaine Necker De Staël (1766-1817).
 
All we have 
upon this earth 
are beginnings 
 

an opening, void, 
a space where 
happiness floats 
 
Pierce the eyeball. 
Strike 
the heart. 
 

Fiction’s only truth 
is the impression 
it produces 

 
Reason and 
imagination 
bound 
 
A history not 
of past but 
future 
 

Nothing true 
and everything 
likely 
 
Each stab within 
my sensitive 
suffering heart 
 
All that falls 
into time’s 
vast chasms 

Vindication

“I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I reason consequentially, as strenuously maintain that they have the same simple direction, as that there is a God.” – Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797).
 
On the shore 
Ephemeron triflers  
Swarm 

 Times and tides 
Soulless bloodlines 
Submissive as soldiers 
 
Legion’s swine squeal 
I was too fond 
of Fanny Blood 
and daughter’s education 

Cast them, cliff-plunge 
Into mortal 
Furnace and  
Airless satellites 

Through sunbeams charming  
and oblique 
Minnow ticklers 
Hook dolphins 

While graceful ivy 
Clasps the oak 
Placental tears and 
Playing God 

Thus God ordains my beauty 
To win the god in him 
And in his name 
My gothic death and resurrection

Fine Art

“Impart to the world you would influence a Direction towards the good, and the quiet rhythm of time will bring it to fulfilment.”– Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805).
 
Dry 
The muses have 
Drained me 
 
Revive 
Through living springs 
Of milk from better ages 
 
That I may 
Into a stranger of my century 
Grow 

Be moved by the drive 
Of the beautiful soul 
To play 

Endure the ordeal 
Defy the opinions 
Masquerading as the world 
 
To resist becoming  
The creature of the 
Century that bore me 

Dignity lost yet artfully rescued 
Amber preserved. 
 
Truth’s terrible vengeance 
Radiant in the dewy  
Valley of the night 
Pursues the tim’rous fugitive 

To the ends of the earth 
To the ends 
of the earth. 
 

The Totality of Our Nature

“True, we know that the outstanding individual will never let the limits of his occupation dictate the limits of his activity. But a mediocre talent will consume in the office assigned him the whole meagre sum of his powers, and a man has to have a mind above the ordinary if, without detriment to his calling, he is still to have time for the chosen pursuits of his leisure.” – Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805).
 
Wedded 
Without seduction 
To Art’s delights and 
Wisdom’s dignity. 
 

Return: 
 
Before poetry tumbled 
In the hayloft with wit 
And speculation spread 
For sophistry’s purse. 
 
Now: fragments uncombined 
Nature torn to ribbons 
 
A shambles. 
 
Clock-work ingenious 
Where the master within us 
Dismantles our cogs 
 
Empty subtleties and 
Pinched pedantry 
Cold and narrow hearts 
 

Glass-armed eyes 
Bending absolute light 

Utility

“Art is a daughter of Freedom, and takes her orders from the necessity inherent in minds, not from the exigencies of matter. But at the present time material needs reign supreme and bend a degraded humanity beneath their tyrannical yoke. Utility is the great idol of our age, to which all powers are in thrall and to which all talent must pay homage.” – Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805).
 
Shun  
The noisy marketplace 
Where stalls and gallows 
Frame the mighty guillotine 
Rectitude blind. 
 
Speak 
With tongue loosed 
From the cud-chew of gossip 
A thin voice grating 
Against the boom of the world. 
 
See 
Above all 
That Beauty will 
Must 
Set you free.

Handmaid

“I should prefer that only those be called works of art in which the artist had occasion to show himself as such and in which beauty was his first and ultimate aim. None of the others, which betray too obvious traces of religious conventions, deserve this name because in their case the artist did not create art for art’s sake, but his art was merely a handmaid of religion, which stressed meaning for beauty, or, out of consideration for art and the more refined taste of the period, has ceased to emphasize it to such a degree that beauty alone would seem to be the sole object. […] Paint for us, you poets, the pleasure, the affection, the love and delight which beauty brings, and you have painted beauty itself.” – Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781).
 
In the mute tongue of painters 
Urania’s wand must 
Into her starsphere 
Ever be thrust 
 
But in other voices 
This handmaid can read 
Inscribed celestial 
Fates mortals heed 

Reduced and visible 
To action suggested, or, 
In progressive imitations, 
Invisible and infinite 

A shield forever turning in a forge. 
 

Laocoön

“According to our notions, there are phenomena, which we conceive as being essentially sudden in their beginning and end and which can be what they are only for a brief moment. However, the prolongation of such phenomena in art, whether agreeable or otherwise, gives them such an unnatural appearance that they make a weaker impression the more often we look at them, until they finally fill us with disgust or horror.” – Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781).
 
The face of the Trojan priest –
whose body, and his sons’,
devoured by snakes,
writhes in pain –
merely sighs

Yet we are haunted
by his cry
which imagination
amplifies

Like a phantom
pregnant
with meaning
climaxes
and dies

Sublime

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” – Edmund Burke (1729-1797).
 
That which killed the cat is, 
for us, essential. 
desire for novelty. 
Yet, before Death comes,  
do we take less pleasure 
in four seasons, repeating, 
than in three hundred and twenty? 
 
My tooth aches and you strike me with a hammer 
just as that great gooseberry Ivan warned, 
once he’d finished swimming, 
chopping circles round the tranquil pond 
and blowing  
horrible shadowblack rings  
of dirty pipesmoke 
 

But then you claw out the offending fang 
and lay the weapon down 
and delight flows through me 
You offer up a cup of wine 
and pleasure runs in blood. 
 
We drink until the cellar is 
a mausoleum 
a sealed crypt of pleasing woe 
with idle bottles strewn as corpses 
and amongst them we lie 
indifferent, disappointed, grieving. 
 
The sickness claws 
as the air runs out 
I take comfort in the beauty of your eyes 
Light pools that sparkle above an infinite depth 
 
But Death stands here vast 
O King of Terrors 
All gaze, all wonder! 

On Beauty as a Symbol of Morality

“Taste as it were makes possible the transition from sensible charm to the habitual moral interest without too violent a leap by representing the imagination even in its freedom as purposively determinable for the understanding and teaching us to find a free satisfaction in the objects of the senses even without any sensible charm.” – Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).
 
If common sense is vulgur
I seek communion with genius
Whose wings have been clipped by taste
That it may lay its golden eggs forever
According to quota and recipe
Imaginiation, beaten with understanding,
Sautéd in spirit
Seasoned to desire and served as beauty.
Buildings majestic ringed
By magnificent trees and smiling fields
Sunkissed in tender colour
Thus we are painted and morally stained.

Exposition

“In relation to the feeling of pleasure an object is to be counted either among the agreeable or the beautiful or the sublime or the (absolutely) good (iucundum, pulchrum, sublime, honestum).” – Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).
 
Iuncundum
The sated appetite
Bellyful

Honestum
At once, at twice
At forever always

Pulchrum
Disinterestedly pleasing
Preparing us for love

Sublime
Resisting sensual interest
Arousing esteem
And fear
A finite portrait of an unattainable sitter.