We Once Felt a Fire
Will we kindle muted passion
In a world of dampened sadness
Or flicker in a tired fashion
Into apathetic madness?
Or like ashes, flimsy and gray,
Will we flutter and drift away
Into a hell free from desire,
Only to look around and say
We once were, we once felt, a fire?
Please bear with me as I explain this short (nine lines) poem. A few years ago, I was reading Byron's Don Juan for probably the tenth time, and I ran into a portion where the narrator was lamenting his increasing lack of desire to court or woo the opposite sex. Byron makes several comparisons between the passion that we have for certain activities as youth and how we seem to forget about these activities when we gain the means, knowledge, and wisdom to carry out them out more effectively as mature adults. Yes, he is talking mostly about sex and romantic love, but it works for all kinds of things.
Anyway, I was inspired by Byron's work to write about how I was once passionate about saving the art of poetry from the free verse diary entry that is currently being sold by university English departments and creative writing workshops as poetry, but then, I gave in and forgot that passion. I said to myself, speaking as if to those people, "You folks have won. I do not have it within my power to make you see that you are not writing what anybody but your fellow creative writing professors and workshop graduates care to read, and I just don't have the fight left in me anymore." In this fit of inspiration, realizing my lack of fervor, I wrote a long poem, two and a half to three pages long. I included references to Byron's poem about passion swarming like summer thunderstorms and romance becoming burlesque as we age...and so on. It was really quite intellectual. I really, really wanted it to work. It was going to be a damned good poem about somebody who ran "more like a man/Flying from something he dreads than one/ who sought the thing he loves.... It was going to be about the "abundant recompense" that one finds when the clock runs "past the hour of thoughtless youth." Yes, I am throwing in all those quotes because my poem had already been done by someone else, several someone elses. It wasn't good. It was imitation, it was mimicry, it was blatant copying from source material that I knew TOO well, so well, in fact, that I was using most of the same words. I should have trashed it.
There was a tingly feeling, though, that made me want to hang onto this poem, and yesterday, I think I figured it out. One twelve-line section in the poem was very vague and ambiguous about the subject of my lack of passion for arguing over what poetry is. If I took it out of the poem, the section could have been about love, romance, sex, baseball, poetry, knitting, farming...in other words, if you can be passionate about something, that part of the poem could have been about that SOMETHING, whatever it is. --And it is really about losing that passion. We have all lost the desire to continue on with some thing or the other in our lives.
As you can tell, I do not have twelve lines in the poem above like the original section. The orginal twelve lines were rhymed ABAB, BABC, CBCC. You can still see the last rhyme scheme in lines 5-8, but I didn't like the rhyme scheme nor two of the lines. Another line got deleted for the current rhyme scheme. The whole thing is now in iambic tetrameter, and it was mixed lines of meter before. I think that I have cut a nearly three pager down to the kernel that I was trying to keep all these years. I believe that the poem can be applied to various situations and still be extremely relevant. See what you think and let me know what you think in the comment box wherever it happens to be on your device. As always, ENJOY!