Greek wayfarers, and other poems

Chapter 60: EPILOGUE

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About This Book

A lyrical collection evokes ancient and modern Greece through mythic retellings, ritual scenes, and landscape vignettes. Poems range from dramatic addresses to figures of legend to intimate portraits of contemporary Easter processions, seafaring rites, funerary stelæ, and rural labor, using vivid sensory detail of temples, hills, and the sea. Themes of memory, reverence, loss, and cultural continuity recur as the poet moves between narrative lyric, ekphrastic responses to antiquities, and pastoral sketches. The result is a varied formal palette that intertwines classical allusion with observations of everyday life and seasonal celebration.

EPILOGUE

As children keep

Some spiraled shell or crystal crusted stone

For wonder and for solace, when alone

They fall asleep,

So do I soft caress

And guard through days of World-dark such a charm

And cherish from indifference and harm

One loveliness.

And every Grecian vase

And sculptured fragment to my eyes doth mean

Life, calm and balanced, simple, and serene,

Transcending Race!