Greek wayfarers, and other poems

Chapter 8: “SHE HAD REVERENCE”

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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.

“SHE HAD REVERENCE”

“O Rhadamanthos, or O Minos, if you have judged any other woman as of surpassing worth, so also judge this young wife of Aristomachos and take her to the Islands of the Blessèd. For she had reverence for the gods and a sense of justice sitting in council with her. Talisos, a Cretan city, reared her and this same earth enfolds her dead; thy fate, O Archidíke!”—From a painted stele in the Museum at Volo.

The dear dead women Browning drew

Lean forth in happy watchfulness;

With them Rossetti’s Starry-tress:

And Tennyson’s royal maidens press

To bring you to their Sacred Few.

Lovely companions wait for you,

Dear Archidíke, wife divine,

With asphodels your locks to twine;

Thus crowning with celestial vine

That noble reverence you knew!