Hades

As he lies fatally ill in bed, June of 323 B.C., Alexander, in the delirium of his disease, must have envisioned the journey that he was about to take through the underworld of Hades.

By Lake Avernus, a malodorous sheet of bad water, was a cavern leading to the underworld. Make sacrifice to the dreaded goddess of night. On the road frightful forms of disease, hunger, death-dealing war, mad discord. Then innumerable spirits at the juncture of two great rivers begging the ferryman, Charon, for transport to the other shore, he choosing only the properly buried who also had the coin, the remainder doomed to aimless wandering with never a rest.

Alexander Afield

“The fang,
horn,
claw,
sting,
snarl,
hiss,
roar,
trumpet,
hoof,
all have fallen to me in the hunt.
I scuffle to hold my ground, to stay on my feet.
In my ferocious roaring, howling, grunting in the beast’s ear, fear of myself stands my hair on end.
In war,
The thrilling war chants,
cries and shrieks,
dust of plains,
bloody wounds,
singing saber,
splintering lance,
clash of shields,
flesh bruised, broken, stuck,
sweat, stench, terror,
wrenching struggle
all have fallen to me in battle.
But this enemy, here, now, inside,
unseen, silent,
strikes me deep,
stabs me with sure death.
Time is brief. The tether to earthly life is short.
Mother!
One secret of Alexander — not from Siwah, mother!
Foresight! Vigor! Beyond necessary!
Blinds the quickly dead!
Preemptive energy, my life, now of no avail.”

There, Hermes! To lead him down.

ENTER MY UNDERWORLD of Poetry

These pages embody my philosophy of poetry and life.
Just as a theory is a statment that attempts to account
for all the known facts in a field of inquiry, a philosophy
is an attempt to organize a body of knowledge; in the case of my
philosophy, it’s how I’ve got it together.

To repeat,
scansion is my thing, not perfect all the time, but it defines poetry
as free or disciplined. It takes poetry somewhere beyond rambling
emotion. It adds the intellect to a weightier presence because
the emotion is an intellectualized form of passion. It brings
the possibility of eloquence, which I define as an achievement,
or effect, issuing only from the amalgam of intellect and
passion. Poetry is something more than an affair of the heart,
a feeling, worn on the sleeve. Poetry makes one feel and think,
think about what you feel,
and feel what you think.
No dichotomy there.

I write according to general principles of scansion. I am not
free under the rules, except in imagination. The discipline
of the rules forces greater attention to the content expressing the
ideas. Therefore, I try to be a “strict constructionist”.
I tire of the scofflaw verse that careens
out of control across the page
ignoring the rules of the road,
missing the elements of rhythm.