.
My Beatrice III
Affording still these glimpses like the first,
those moments you were yet without a name;
between us was the distance untraversed:
the bringing into being what you became.
Four times I glance into the rearview mirror,
each time a Kurosawa axial cut:
you’re here, then there, then there, then disappear.
It’s perfect, yes, but then again it’s not:
it’s culturally askew. I’ve still to find
Antonioni space for ambient,
in which you’d walk and walk, while from behind
the camera fails to see what it has meant.
In closer focus, modestly you blur.
My muse, refuse: I can’t be your auteur.
.
.
Stephen Binns is an editor at the Smithsonian (the institution, not the magazine). His most recently published poetry appeared in the January 2023 issue of First Things.
Extremely well done in all respects. I’d like to read I and II.
This very sophisticated and modern sonnet shows that Binns is highly skilled, and not just as a translator of Dante. He puts together the traditional idea of a poetic Muse, the Eternal Feminine of Beatrice, and the cinematic technique of the “axial cut.” And the poem ends with a confession of the sheer complexity of the mixture.
The near-rhymes in the second quatrain work well, and lend a quiet balance to an otherwise perfectly rhymed piece. The final couplet that rhymes “blur” and “auteur” is unexpected and striking.
I don’t know enough about film or photography to fully understand this sonnet, but I love the rhymes, the sense of yearning (“the distance untraversed”), and the ways in which it seems you’ve used a photography metaphor to portray the mysterious Beatrice relationship.
“Walk and walk” being repetitive gave me the feeling of a prolonged period of time as did “the distance untraversed.” Excellent!
Yes, this is first order writing and makes me wish to read a whole collection by Stephen Binns, not something I always want to do. Certain lines have a yearning resonance: ‘the bringing into being what you became’ and the concluding couplet is quite awesome in its effects. The ‘striking’ aspect of the final rhyme is its slant nature, as with Frost’s hence/difference and here too it has a mimetic effect, since it ‘blurs’ the rhyming as the image is blurring.
Thanks to all of you talented people for your kind words and careful reading. And kudos to Evan for finding a perfect illustration of a Kurosawa axial cut, which I’d only associated with his samurai films. Evan’s finding an instance with an actress is so much better.
The axial cut: Let’s say a mounted samurai is galloping away. Rather than holding on the retreating motion, Kurosawa might show him at fifty yards away (cut), then one hundred yards away (cut), then two hundred yards away (cut).
So glad that no one had a problem with “walk and walk.” A signature of Antonioni’s films is a long passage in which an actress (usually his wife, Monica Vitti) walks and walks, perhaps aimlessly, followed by the camera. Orson Welles once told an interviewer why he was bored by Antonioni, saying something along these lines:
“We follow the woman down a long street and we think, ‘Surely we aren’t going to turn the corner with her!’ But then we do!”
“My Beatrice III” is striking and beautifully crafted with layers of meaning that beg the reader to explore. I’m in awe.
Instead of exploring various character passages,
the camera navigates a mixture of visions in a different reality,
from the start and towards the end, a mixture of visions.
Well done, Stephen. The optical effect of cinematic landscape techniques is well applied to the muse who is never easy to encounter.