It is said that good poets have drunk the honey mead that was distilled from the blood of Kvasir, who was himself formed from the saliva of the gods. Odin dispenses this mead himself, and to drink it is a privilege not given to many.
It is said that bad poets have sipped a drop of that mead when it dribbled from Odin’s beak, during the episode in which he transformed into an eagle to steal it from the giants.
In the version of that myth that I just read in Neil Gaiman’s latest book, a re-telling of Norse mythology of which I’ll post a review as soon as I finish it, he says that good poets drink the mead that poured from Odin’s beak–Odin being transformed into an eagle at the time– into the vats that Thor had prepared. The bad poets drink the bit of mead that spewed from Odin’s rear end.
Wherever the mead of poetry comes from, there are moments when I can’t tell one from the other.
Yesterday, I did not watch the press conference that TV’s Donald Trump held; I suppose I should have, but there’s only so much I can take. I waited for the cliff notes.
It was then that I heard that President Trump had uttered the phrase “The tone is such hatred,” in his press conference.
“The tone is such hatred.”
I was transported.
That phrase has a rhythm to it; such an interesting, jaggedy sound. It’s not a common meter in English. It’s something you don’t usually hear. Unstressed-stressed-stressed, unstressed-stressed-stressed. Duh-DUH-DUH duh-Duh-Duh. A bacchius. So much rarer than an iamb, which mimics plain English and sounds refined, or a trochee which inverts plain English and sounds wicked. Not like a dactyl that mimics the marching of soldiers either. The bacchius mimics the sound of a running horse or a shallow waterfall.
“The tone is such hatred.“
Of course, if a real poet wrote that out, they’d meddle with the line breaks to make it sound despairing– breathless, a lover taken aback at the coldness of the beloved.
The tone is
such
hatred.
The line breaks there would mimic the quiet sobs of a man who has taken too much bitterness and can take no more, but is far too melancholy to have a proper tantrum. Perhaps we should put a title on it, to tease us with a bit of context.
Lines Penned In Despair
by the poet D. T.
The tone is
such
hatred.
It’s the kind of poem you’d expect to find scribbled on a napkin next to a half-finished bottle of absinthe, just before the jilted lover hurled himself into the sea.
That’s an even better title for it, now that I think of it. And let’s omit the punctuation.
Absinthe
The tone
is such
hatred
–d. t.
However, if you read that version of the poem properly with a catch in your voice, it loses its bacchius. It becomes a trochee, more or less. Not as rare, not as ragged. So perhaps it was better as only one line after all. Meddling with the found subject matter might take away its earthiness, make it look staged. The raw nature of the line is what drew me to it in the first place.
Perhaps I should go back to admiring it in its original form. But then, the surprising pop of the original form is lost to me; it looks familiar and commonplace now. With familiarity comes a bit of absurdness, as language tends to do. It’s become an abstract line of syllables crackling in my brain like those plastic-wrapped gunpowder snappers they sell for a dollar a box.
I meant to say something witty about yesterday’s press conference itself, and somehow I’m talking about poetry and firecrackers. And honestly, those things are far, far more exciting. Let’s talk about poetry and firecrackers until the Trump administration is a distant memory, itself the subject of good poetry.
Good poets have drunk Odin’s mead, from the vats or straight from his beak. Bad poets have drunk the mead that spewed from the other side.
But those of us who can spot poetry where there is none– ours is the rarest and most wonderful mead.
(image via Pixabay)
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