What Green Altar Is This?

What Green Altar…

“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?”

It is to this green altar then that I come. To this blog, this cyber-place, this tank o’ think and thunk. This is my urn. Hopefully, there will also be the occasional ode…

Probably no Greek though, ancient or otherwise.

(And here I am already taking liberties; my only defense being that if Keats is allowed his ‘drest’ then I can bring on my ‘thunk’ -- while, I readily admit, fingering a much more humble poetic license in my pocket).

Yet I can’t tinker everything into making sense. This is poetry and gardens and life. Sometimes it works and sometimes it goes oh so what-the-heck-was-that-all-about? And that is the point where the sacrifice requirement often steals the scene.

Things happen. Words twist into rhyme. Weeds find the cracks. Something comes and something goes and often it is the same thing caught both coming and going even if you don’t know it until later on.

Well, it will all make sense later on, we hope. And that is what poetry and gardens and life are for: to sort, to sow, to stare into space until rows and rows of things appear, scratched out by invisible hoes, ready for syllables or seeds…

You’ve been patient. I’m about to cut through the sod and plant something here.

I doubt any ode has been scrutinized, analyzed, criticized or whateverized more often than John Keats’, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. (1) It wasn’t those ‘silken flanks’ that garnered up some trouble -- and if I were an old lover of his I’d be more concerned about the ‘heifer’ reference -- with poetry critics (you evil, evil thugs) but the final lines:

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Trite and a bit preachy, those might be. Perhaps the best known critique was that of Josiah Conder, published in a September 1820 Eclectic Review: “That is, all that Mr Keats knows or cares to know. But till he knows much more than this, he will never write verses fit to live.”(2)

Bam! Makes one just want to run away from home and join the poetry circus. And thus began the whole ‘beauty as truth’ argument. Does a line in a poem have to be ‘true’ to be considered beautiful? Does it need to be understood as a statement of fact to have lyrical value? Does art, or does poetry have to be, or should they be, literal? Or is there something else beneath the words, hidden and lurking in rhyme or form or hesitation, which ‘is’ the poem and provokes the response?

Oh, I do love a good ambiguity.

And a snappy title…

References:

1. Bartleby.com; http://www.bartleby.com/101/625.html

2. Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_on_a_Grecian_Urn