Welcome to the latest Drollerie Press blog tour. This month I’m hosting Meredith Holmes, whose book Unseelie has had me curious for a while, though I haven’t yet gotten myself a copy. Also, I’m told her story “Widow’s Walk” will appear in the upcoming Drollerie Press anthology Things That Go Bump in the Night, along with (among other things) my poem “Subterranean Song.”

This is National Poetry Month, a month I would have dreaded as a kid. The poems we were exposed to in elementary and junior high were dull to me–institutional things churned out by no doubt hopeful poets and put into text books. Example poems, my teachers called them before telling us to “write in that style” and marking off points if we wrote our own way. I was lucky–at home we had tons of books and I was able to find poems and prose that were more to my liking, namely poems which made me feel profoundly moved and had such a strength of imagery and feeling that I’d be swept up in the words and nearly breathless. When I began writing more and more, really focusing on turning it into something I’d like to share with the world, I thought of the poems I’d read and what made them so special. More than the novels I read and short stories I’d perused, the poems came to mind. They were small stories unto themselves and could hold a universe of meaning in just a few lines. Two of my favorites, Bright Star by Keats and The Old Astronomer to his Pupil by Sarah Williams came up over and over again (though to be honest, I have a long list of favorites, mostly English Romantics such as Byron, Keats, Blake and more and also American poets like Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou).

When writing Unseelie in it’s original three-novella form, Bright Star and The Old Astronomer… kept coming up in my mind as I thought of the relationship between Alfhild and Cadfael. They are coming up even more so now that I’m working on my Demon trilogy and am writing another set of love stories that seem impossible to the characters, obstacles growing between them even as they themselves grow closer. Bright Star speaks so clear and true about Keats’ own love for Fanny Brawne, written as he was dying, that it inspires my own development of the characters’ relationships. The Old Astronomer… is so simple and pure: an old astronomer who is passing away, telling his pupil how to go on, that he is not afraid and the student should not be either, that it inspires me to write characters with backbone, with honesty and forthrightness. The last line of The Old Astronomer was used as an epitaph on the tomb of an astronomer couple in New York–this just makes it additionally poignant for me! Below are the poems I’ve been raving on and on about–I hope you like them as much as I do!

The Old Astronomer to His Pupil

Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet,
When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;
He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how
We are working to completion, working on from then to now.

Pray remember that I leave you all my theory complete,
Lacking only certain data for your adding, as is meet,
And remember men will scorn it, ’tis original and true,
And the obloquy of newness may fall bitterly on you.

But, my pupil, as my pupil you have learned the worth of scorn,
You have laughed with me at pity, we have joyed to be forlorn,
What for us are all distractions of men’s fellowship and smiles;
What for us the Goddess Pleasure with her meretricious smiles!

You may tell that German College that their honor comes too late,
But they must not waste repentance on the grizzly savant’s fate.
Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

Sarah Williams

Bright Star

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors–
No–yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever–or else swoon to death.

John Keats

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• Drollerie Press book sale
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• Call for Submissions: Trafficking in Magic/Magicking in Traffic
• Updates to appearances
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