Barcarolle

Empedocles on Etna is a poem

By the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold.

Readily I’ll concede that poetry is a criticism of life (his phrase)

About as much as red-hot iron

Is a criticism of fire,

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But we’re in Sicily.

The gods are still with us.

The sun has warmed the rocks

On which we’re lounging, eating goat cheese, drinking new wine.

You’re hardly wearing any clothes.

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Nobody’s wearing clothes!

Neither is anyone

Worried about sunlight.

This is before Jesus, before Socrates,

Before the double onslaught of guilt and rationality

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Doomed us (I’m paraphrasing Nietzsche) to believe

In the rectification of the world

Through knowledge—to live

Within the limited circle of soluble problems,

Where we may cheerfully say to life

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I want you! You’re worth knowing!

Empedocles is having a bad day.

Once, he was a god;

Smart, good-looking, too.

You understand how anyone might feel that way

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Just being where we are, tasting things, just breathing the air.

Above us, Etna’s cone

Emits its languorous white plume.

Miracles? Mistrust them, says Empedocles.

Mind is a spell that governs

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Heaven and earth.

Is it so small a thing

To have enjoyed the sun,

To have lived lightly in the spring,

To have loved, to have thought, to have done?

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Obvious as the answer to this question may be, convincing, too,

Empedocles climbs beyond the ashen trees,

The potholes red as an open wound,

And steps into a cloud.

A poem of passive suffering, said Arnold,

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Could have no place in his collected poems.

No place! His greatest poem! Whose suffering

Isn’t passive? What else

Could suffering be?

One night in Venice

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I couldn’t sleep; I heard the bells

Of San Giacomo ring four times, then five.

I heard the mutter of a boat, two voices, a woman’s and a man’s,

Then somehow rising

Between them, as from the water itself,

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The Chopin barcarolle.

Where were they going?

Who could they have been?

Why were they playing Chopin

In their little boat, playing it softly, just for me? Remember

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When we lived like forest creatures,

You and I, when all

We left behind were footsteps

Crushed in the wet grass?

When I opened my eyes

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Sun-stirred water played

Across the ceiling;

You were asleep.

It felt like being

In the present, being alive.