"May My Enemy Be Assuaged" by Derek Walcott

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Fallout from last week

-The poetry-prose spectrum, and those pesky in-betweeners

-Amphibrachs for days

-Parallelism, and how to sound "biblical"

-The universal accessibility of beauty

-Rain on a sunny day is called WHAT?

-The feminization of landscape

-Hopefully the only time I'll mention Kanye on this show.

-Hopkins cameo!

-Totally tubular priests

-If it ain't Baroque...

-My excursion to the Virgins

-The myth of the Noble Savage (Rousseau sucks eggs)

-It always comes back to Adam and Eve

-Spacetime as a fresco of divine art

-Toggling between the cosmic and the moral world

Text of lyric:

May my enemy be assuaged by these waves because they are beautiful even to his evil, may the drizzle be a benediction to his heart even as it is to mine; they say here that the devil is beating his wife when the sun shines through the wires of fine, fine rain. It is not my heart that forgives my enemy his obscene material desires but the flare of a leaf, the dart of a mottled dove, the processional surplices of breakers entering the cove as penitents enter the dome to the lace of an altar; beauty so shaping neither condemns nor saves like the tenets of my enemy’s church, the basilicas of tumbling cherubs and agonized saints and riots of purpureal cloud; though I have cause I will share the world’s beauty with my enemies even though their greed destroys the innocence of my Adamic island. My enemy is a serpent as much as he is in a fresco, and he in all his scales and venom and glittering head is part of the island’s beauty; he need not repent.

Support the show

BUY VERSECRAFT MERCH HERE. VISIT THE VERSECRAFT SUBSTACK HERE.

Please subscribe, rate, and review! Thanks so much for listening.

You can leave me a tip, support the podcast, or request a commission here! TikTok: @versecraft Send me a note at: versecraftpodcast@gmail.com

My favorite poetry podcasts for: Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /) Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u) Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /) Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u) Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u) Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /) Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u) Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)