Byzantium Burning - Jack Gilbert
Jul. 8th, 2013 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricWhen I looked at the stubborn dark Buddha
high in the forest, I noticed crimson
just along where his lips closed.
And understood Byzantium was burning.
So there would be no more injustice.
Unless everyone can sit on a throne
that rises and has enamelled birds that sing,
no one should sit on such a throne.
Such a city measures the merit of villagers.
So it was all perishing in there at last.
The definitions of space by basilicas.
The shape of the law in the mind of Justinian.
But how could he dare, this opulent Buddha
with his temples and everyone adoring,
preach to me of the ordinary? Who was he
to subtract Byzantium from the size of my people?
So I begin to sing. Build and sing.
Sing and build inside my thin lips.
I don't know what to make of the framing metaphor concerning the Buddha (& assocated cultural appropriation wossnames, which I can't even begin to weigh up since I can't untangle the intended meaning in the first place), but Byzantium here is Yeat's Byzantium. There are references to it scattered through the second half of Monolithos, and I'm a sucker for Yeats and his Byzantine delusions of grandeur.
high in the forest, I noticed crimson
just along where his lips closed.
And understood Byzantium was burning.
So there would be no more injustice.
Unless everyone can sit on a throne
that rises and has enamelled birds that sing,
no one should sit on such a throne.
Such a city measures the merit of villagers.
So it was all perishing in there at last.
The definitions of space by basilicas.
The shape of the law in the mind of Justinian.
But how could he dare, this opulent Buddha
with his temples and everyone adoring,
preach to me of the ordinary? Who was he
to subtract Byzantium from the size of my people?
So I begin to sing. Build and sing.
Sing and build inside my thin lips.
I don't know what to make of the framing metaphor concerning the Buddha (& assocated cultural appropriation wossnames, which I can't even begin to weigh up since I can't untangle the intended meaning in the first place), but Byzantium here is Yeat's Byzantium. There are references to it scattered through the second half of Monolithos, and I'm a sucker for Yeats and his Byzantine delusions of grandeur.