“Is it Consensual, Swan Swooning over the Lady?”

Our latest prompt—to write a brief but profound poem, whether in verse or prose, about a resonant mythic figure—provoked an impressive array of responses. I suggested such subjects as the sirens in The Odyssey, Prometheus, Don Juan, Andromache, the Bible’s Esther, Catherine the Great, Helen of Troy, Othello, Lady Macbeth, and Hamlet. Although poets don’t always consider research a prerequisite to composition, I pointed out that it pays to read up on a figure that has already beguiled many great poets and fiction writers before us.

Charise Hoge wins the blue ribbon for “Leda,” her poem that revisits the myth at the center of William Butler Yeats’s famous sonnet “Leda and the Swan.” Attracted to the beautiful Leda, Zeus turns himself into a swan, swoops up the maiden, and ravishes her. Here is Charise’s unusual take, with its irresistible opening:

Is it consensual,
swan swooning
over the lady…
rushing her body
as she bathes?
He, a god, uses
trickery three times.
Once, to don the swan,
then to take her down,
last, to drop the act.
All those feathers
she’ll feel forever.

Michael C. Rush is a close runner-up with “Polyphemus,” his poem about the Cyclops, the one-eyed giant from whose savage clutches Odysseus employs brilliant trickery to escape. When the blinded Cyclops asks for his captive’s name, Odysseus responds “Nobody,” so when Polyphemus cries for help, he is obliged to admit that “Nobody” is to blame.

Millennia
after he stabbed my eye
and left
to return home,
millennia after he died,
after his wife died,
after his dog died,
after his children’s children’s children died,
here I sit, still,
still blind,
still enraged,
still remembering
the brief glimpse
of the blade.

One may question the poem’s premise: that Odysseus, being mortal, dies, but the Cyclops lives eternally in myth. (After all, Odysseus, too, lives eternally in myth.)  Michael presents the Cyclops as an “enraged” victim, but it is not the anger but the sharpness of the final image that wins us over: “the brief glimpse / of the blade.”

For sheer ingenuity, it would be difficult to top Anna Ojascastro Guzon’s “Well-Tempered,” which inventively blends the music of Johann Sebastian Bach with the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch:

She sees what nobody else sees
yet she never sees what’s plain.
A fangirl of saints and thinkers
she taped a poster of Teresa
to her mirror and played
her epistles on repeat.
If only she could’ve been alive
back when martyrs could writhe
for a cause, unlike her contemporaries.
What a shame. What a merry time
she would have known had she
rocked her suburban stage.
Dorothea Brooke and the Bachs:
A world premiere, a Victorian invention

The last three lines are particularly striking in their jolting juxtapositions.

Columbia University undergraduate Ari Gordon taps into Yiddish legend for “Golem of Prague”:

To live, one must have a name; yes,
Tattoos of numbers are but lies.
With (ha!) Shem in his mouth, arise,
Golem of Prague, Jew’s gift from God.

Some stories more, in others, less:
A Hero? Slave? Chaotic force?
The genizah’s man is, of course,
A clod … is a clod is a clod.

A great deal of thought went into these eight lines. In line three, there is an untranslatable pun on the substitute phrase devout Jews use to invoke God, whose sacred name is to be uttered only in the liturgy and on official occasions. This follows immediately upon a metonym for the abuses inflicted upon Jews in concentration camps: “Tattoos of numbers are but lies.”

For the first time to my knowledge, we received submissions from both a father and a son. Ken Gordon, Ari’s dad, who edits the Substack newsletter The Sonneteer, submitted an untitled sonnet, nominally about the wicked monarch Richard III, but with a glance—provoked by the rhyme of “acts” of “sax”—at bebop jazz and its arguably foremost practitioner, Charlie Parker:

When Richard the Bad tells himself and us:
“Now is”—I think: “Did the clock just commence?”
Or is his meaning more ambiguous?
Did the Globe just shift to the present tense?
He outlines the evil part he will play
In the scenes of his five allotted acts,
But about that now, there is more to say,
Which was best said by a man with a sax.
Now’s also the time of Charlie Parker,
Whose streaming alto genius showed that now
Is now and now, forever. (A darker
Truth than “Live for the moment” will avow.)
A question: “Now is”—trochee or iamb?
Some might be certain. Not sure that I am.

Rachel Hadas, the renowned poet and classicist, sent me a poem about the son of Odysseus, “Theoclymenos Buttonholes Telemachus”:

Telemachus can’t wait to board his ship
back to Ithaca, where all’s not well,
as he well knows. He also hopes to dodge
the overwhelming hospitality
of kind old Nestor (“Stay another day!”).
But he is buttonholed at the last minute
(does he have buttons or buttonholes? Never mind)
by a frantic fellow seeking sanctuary,
Theoclymenos by name, who’s killed
a kinsman (we are not told who or why,
though we are told this fugitive’s a prophet)
and needs to flee in a hurry. Is it worth
a slight delay at the eleventh hour
to take a panicky soothsayer on board?
What would you do?
Telemachus takes his chances.

While the poem was well-received by NLP regulars, two astute critical responses addressed the poem’s ending and suggested alternatives. From Heather Newman: “I think I like ‘What would you do?’ as the final line!” and Michael C. Rush: “Or eliminate it. Either way I think would hit harder.”

With my impish streak, I took the opportunity to write lines about eight figures. Each line features an internal rhyme:

In his mind Othello wasn’t a jealous fellow.
Dorothea Brooke married a pedant, a bore, and a non-existent book.
Moll Flanders can teach you more than Ann Landers.
Apollo felt hollow when Daphne turned tree.
Don Juan aroused the wonder of the dons.
(Byron’s Don Juan gave you more to chew on;
he rhymes Juan with “new one” and “true one.”)
Helen of Troy proved that love plus death equals joy.
Take a deep breath before you challenge Lady Macbeth.
So see me thus, Prometheus.

Had I the space, I would also quote the imaginative entries of Diana Ferraro, whose Odysseus, a cheating husband, makes a “nervous phone call” explaining that he “missed the flight,” Millicent Caliban’s invocation of Lady Macbeth, and Pamela Joyce Shapiro’s “Eros,” who “is more malicious / than mischievous.”

Thanks to everyone who took part.

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For our next prompt, how about a haiku: 17 syllables stretched over three lines in a five-seven-five pattern. Let us write haikus on the season (or a place, or a time), focusing on one thing, one tiny detail, that can stand for the whole.

Here’s an example from Bashō, Japan’s best-known haiku write. This one adheres, in translation, to the rule of five syllables in line one, seven in line two, and five in line three.

Canola flowers:
The moon in the eastern sky,
Sun in the western.

Sidelining the five-seven-five requirement, however, we get, in Robert Hass’s rendering, these examples of Bashō’s artistry:

Mosquito at my ear—
does he think
I’m deaf?

and

Even in Kyoto—
hearing the cuckoo’s cry—
I long for Kyoto.

On a visit to Japan, I reduced what is arguably Bashō’s most famous haiku to three syllables:

Frog
Pond
Splash!

So really, it’s up to you whether to adhere strictly to the five-seven-five rule or to veer off into an extreme of minimalism. Multiple entries are welcome.

Deadline: Two weeks after this post goes up, or December 31, 2025, whichever is sooner.

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