| “The Poem As Mask”
By Muriel Rukeyser
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Orpheus
When I wrote of the women in their dances and
wildness, it
was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone
down with
song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from
myself.
There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory
of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued
child
beside me among the doctors, and a word
of rescue from the great eyes.
No more masks! No more mythologies!
Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.
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Sunday, February 10, 2013
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Obviously the mask the phantom wears within “Phantom of the Opera” is a central theme, and I liked how you included a poem based off of the same symbol.
ReplyDelete“The Poem As Mask” by Muriel Rukeyser names the mask in itself when it says: “when I wrote of the women in their dances and / wildness, it was a mask” in which he is solidifying its symbolic meaning. I was especially drawn in when the narrator of your poem compares his own exile to the exile of God, then says: “There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory / of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued / child”, first comparing himself to God then saying He doesn’t exist. This can be compared to the Phantom in “The Phantom of the Opera”, who, like the narrator of the poem, does not exist entirely. He is known as a ghost, not a man, just as the man in the poem cannot completely state his own existence when he denies that of God’s.