Anyway, on our recent vacation to San Francisco, Kellie, Sarah, and I visited the California Academy of Sciences. A primary exhibit at this institution is called Rain Forests of the World. I will entertain you (I hope!) with pictures from the Rain Forest exhibit while I prepare you for a brand new poem called A Song for Rain.
The picture above is of some type of carnivorous plant. I do not recall that it was a type of Venus fly trap, but since I saw only its scientific name, it could have been.
Today's brand-spanking new and barely revised poem is inspired by a Percy Shelley poem published posthumously by his wife, Mary, in an 1829 collection called The Keepsake. The poem The Aziola is about a sad cry heard in the evening by Percy and Mary that stirs his soul, I suppose, to write a poem about it. I looked up the word "aziola" and found nothing. I suspect that it is an Italian word. I may investigate further, and I may not. It does not matter to my poem-nor does the name of the flower pictured above because I do not remember it anyway.
You may have noticed in reading my blog that I have an affinity for Percy Shelley's poems. You will find it odd, then, that I do not much appreciate his poetry overall. I find it energetic, emotional, and full of wonderfully unformed and often incoherent ideas, much as I find my early poetry, which is another consistently fruitful source of worthwhile inspiration. Shelley, in my estimation, never mastered the poetic aspect of casual wordcraft, and so his rhymed lines and blank verse never rise to the easy conversational and very readable tones of his peers. I suspect this to be because he did not have the immediate competition and the challenging sounding boards that his fellow English romantics enjoyed. Coleridge and Wordsworth, both masters in their early poetic careers, had one another off which to bounce their words. Keats had the ultimate competitor Death measuring and editing his every line.
Of course, Percy did have his wife Mary, whose novel Frankenstein can be counted among the greatest of all time, as a faithful listener and maybe critic, but from what I have read of her poetry, she was hardly a worthy judge. Also, Shelley had Byron. However, Byron was on his own stage playing a part that Shelley could not enter upon or ever hope to act. Byron was a satirical wit, criticizing society through partially veiled true stories of itself. Shelley criticized society but bluntly and openly with no apparent flair for subtlety.
I do not know the name of the orange flowers above, but notice how they glisten.
Anyhow, I feel that I am inspired by Percy Shelley because he reminds me of me with the exception that I have lived long past my inability to see what I am lacking as a poet. The current version of me, the poet, struggles to find ideas and avoids eager, animated emotion because living a life on emotional edge is very dangerous, especially to those around him--me--if I could still do so.
Percy Shelley died in a watery grave during a violent squall in the Bay of Lerici off the north-west coast of Italy near Pisa at the age of 29. How ironic that I use his work as an inspiration for a poem lamenting the lack of rain here in North Arkansas.
The picture above is of various colored mosses that grow in tropical streams. Below is my daily offering of a poem. Would my faithful readers call this one of my "nature" poems, or is it something else? Let me know. But, first, enjoy!
A Song for Rain
(Inspired by but not much like P. Shelley’s The Aziola)
Trilling and trilling and trilling,
The thirsty tree frogs call.
The clouds are blanched light blue not black.
No drops are likely to fall.
The warbling bluebird at my sill,
His throat wrung dry as dust,
Sings soundless psalms to absent rains
Whose skiving seems unjust.
Does the rain fall on all alike?
That’s surely what I’ve heard.
Its sweetness rousing soil and soul
No song has ever stirred.
Far, far sweeter than any hymn,
Its chorus slakes the sky,
But when rain does not sing for me,
I bow my head and cry.
Your music, I cannot forget,
Nor how your showers move me,
Dear Rain, please show you know me yet,
For I will always love thee.
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