IN MEMORIAM HELEN VENDLER, APRIL 2024
Critics who die are never loved;
Love itself is a paradox their ambiguous work
Cannot solve; theirs are the rocks
The penmanship of prose is driven onto –
Theirs the grove the poet is not laurelled in –
Canyons divide what labours they prove
To themselves have value, from
The impression made by them on authors
Stranded to one side of their prodigious wake –
They take more than they give, some say –
While others bask in their praise, as if
Their gift was new, more luminous solar rays –
But even when their own texts approach,
Penumbral, art itself, the beauty or truth
They claim remains incongruously peripheral,
Like the third lover in any complicated bed –
Used, then merely tolerated, perhaps despised,
For envy is bred by savage intimacy entangled by
Parasitical limbs – or what passes lyrically for such,
In the books they tore to shreds, or adumbrated,
As the worthiest of desire’s deceitful accolades.
All that can be said, fairly or in fallacious fury,
Surely is, the problematic of their lives is maybe resolved,
Perhaps pyrrhically, by the fact at least they failed in
style.
April 24th, 2024, London
by T Swift
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