More on Powell

Requested, and served: more notes on DA Powell's poem 'corydon & alexis, redux'.

As I noted, this poem positions itself as a response to Virgil's second eclogue. Stephen points out several other echos, from Hill, Johnson, and Yeats. And another that I think is there, scattered like his 'seeds of the honey locust,' is Keats' poem 'Ode to a Nightingale'. Certainly, with 'oh, you who are young', Powell invokes the transforms his response to an ode; and in fact, what is Virgil's original form but a song of praise, an ode? There being many odes, and many apropos of this poem, it was the hemlock that drew me to Keats, 'My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk'.

Happily, for the sake of my instincts being rewarded, there are several points of intersection between Keats and Powell. The 'slight shade of those sapling branches / yearning for that vernal beau' seems to repackage what Keats describes with, 'what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, / But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet / Wherewith the seasonable month endows / The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild'. I would be amiss to see some inspiration from 'Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies' in 'consider how quickly the body deranges itself' — each describe a body withering from disease, perhaps the ever-present (for Powell) HIV. It's as if the later poet is pointing us back to Keats' line. At this point, I may be reaching, but that linked set of rings from Corydon's song in the eclogues to Keats' ode-song being hooked to Powell as well seems too strong a line to resist.

There is another register of language altogether dissimilar from Keats, in lines such as 'guess I figured to be done with desire . . . the way one burns a pile of twigs and brush', and 'thought I could master nature.' It's a particularly American idiom at work, and I'm tempted to cite Frost particular for the simplicity of diction merging with existentialism and a mundane rustic task. But who does not owe something to Frost? And this mixing of registers is more akin to late Ashbery besides.

I would rather site Yeats' poem 'Leda and the Swan' — 'her thighs caressed / By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill' — in regards to Powell's 'how this longing grabs me by the nape', and say that the bill which is in 'nape caught in his bill' could be where the metaphor of 'the cruel banker' was born with its swanish 'white as god's own ribs'. The connection certainly adds something to the animal desire and the 'savage caring', and connects, in a round-about way, desire to both old age and nature. Still, something there is in Powell that never wants to be linked too tightly, I think, in debt to other poems.