panopticon

Last year, I posted Rita Dove's "Ludwig Van Beethovens' Return to Vienna", from Sonata Mulattica (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009). I hadn't read the rest of Sonata Mulattica at the time, but I checked it out of the library for poetry month this year. The whole collection (she calls it "A Life in Five Movements and a Short Play", and it really is exactly that) is utterly brilliant, and I highly recommend it; it's a historical novel -- or maybe a play -- in poetry: poetic and musical and layered and character-driven and political.

Of course, the problem with it being character-driven, and largely narrative, is that it turns out to be very difficult to excerpt. I don't really feel like I can do justice to the collection's protagonist, or its scope, with a single excerpted poem; what I can do is illustrate one particular moment of setting and time (out of a much larger movement and life; this poem is still much better in the context of the whole book). And really, while she is very, very good at many different kinds of poetry, Rita Dove especially excels at the dramatic monologue.

For everyone who has ever lost themselves in a Regency romance, or been briefly -- or more extensively -- obsessed with the Hanoverians.

1811: The Prince Regent celebrates himself

I have always believed that love is
an overflowing, an abundance one needs
to be rid of, to pour into another. That other
can be a man or a woman, dog or hillock
or headdress of ostrich feathers; it can be
sculpture or shoreline or even a sunless day
seeping its silvery light over the Thames.
It may arrive quietly, a moment between moments
in the river of talk, after the hot soup but before
the mutton; or it can be the mutton, too—
its ginger tang and musky finish.
However it comes, the sensation is
massive, inconvenient, undeniable.

If one were to banish extravagance,
all longing would take on edges. Witness
the general, poised on the smoking field,
as he surveys the strewn body bits
with a ghoulish mix of rue and relish;
he has won another snippet of territory
and is hungry for more. Love is rounder
and less dignified; if love brandished a sword
I would kneel and bare my neck.

Some call me gaudy, capricious; it's true
that I drool when I drink and cannot walk the path
from bed to breakfast tray without wheezing.
I'm gouty, corseted, flatulent—but it's all
because I cannot refuse a thing its chance
to shine, to sigh or deliquesce. So let there be
stars in every glass and fireworks over the park,
spun sugar pagodas on mirrored lakes, diamonds,
a footman in ancient armor, crimson drapery;
and down the center of the banquet table
set for two hundred in the Gothic conservatory

an actual stream—pure water cascading
between banks of real moss with tiny flowers—
and fish flashing, gold and silver, down the sluice.

More pineapples, more cherry wine!
Tell the other two thousand guests
gathered in Carlton House
that we are here to show the world
England's swaggering heart;
and that I intend to celebrate all century,
until something even grander arrives—
more outrageous and beautiful—to swallow me
in its monstrous, invisible embrace.

~Rita Dove (b. 1952), "The Regency Fete" from Sonata Mulattica, 2009.