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See the painting more closely here.
Eden
The newborn world is all aswirl with beasts
Obedient who, as God specified,
Have duly fruitful been, have multiplied
And claim laid to the garden west to east.
Their prowl for food and flesh knows no surcease;
With feral instinct so preoccupied
(As mammals munch in happy fratricide)
They barely note the human arrivistes.
Amid this world of roving appetite
The pair, their souls as naked as their skin,
Their Maker’s grace in twofold flesh distill.
Yet Adam, as his eyes first take Eve in,
First knows the trenchant stirrings of free will;
God holds her wrist, perhaps a bit too tight.
__For while these two delight,
His biting eyes as yet make out the end
Whereto this all too earthly flesh will tend.
__It already impends:
Off to the side where one can hardly see,
An apple sits that’s fallen from a tree…
.
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The Garden of Earthly Delights
All nature is distorted now, perverse,
As frenzy wanton far and wide presides.
In endless circles dry desire rides,
And fruit grown monstrous cannot slake the thirst.
Gigantic birds and fish are interspersed
With mythic beasts and forms that have decried
All beastly nature, God’s designs defied.
Yet human nature’s clearly all the worse.
For once these rutting things had living souls
Subsumed in God but severed now by lust
Insatiable they somehow call delight.
In endless permutations they adjust
Themselves to unleashed pleasure’s strangest rites
And Paradise is now a Grand Guignol:
__A garish rigmarole
Of human impulse twisted into knots,
All dignity rejected or forgot
__As near the center squats
With head to ground some soul within the throes
Of sodomy inflicted with a rose.
.
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Hell
A ravaged city’s belching smoke ingrains
A livid sky whose onyx clouds are tried
By stunted rays like searchlights misapplied,
For search in such a darkness is in vain.
A bloody lake has taken on its stain
From corpses of the endless genocide;
Another’s frozen solid, vitrified
By cold despair, benumbed by human pain.
A tortured orchestra the ears beset—
Someone is crucified upon a lute;
A horn is muted by a severed limb—
While fore the Lord of Evil Absolute
Devours corpses and ad interim
Excretes them into some hell deeper yet.
__Delight turned to regret
Eternal is the fate of human flesh
That thought it could from godly soul unmesh
__Itself and thus refresh
Unendingly the crest of pleasure’s swell—
A wave that breaks upon the shores of Hell.
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Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Agape Review, America Magazine, Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, U.S. Catholic, Grand Little Things, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He is editor of the Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.
Magnificent!
My favourite painting now has a poetic accompaniment!
Thanks for this!!
Jeffrey,
I just finished book two of “The Faerie Queen” and have to say that, near the end, after Spenser has so vividly described the Garden of Earthly Delights and the Bower of Bliss, part of me found the knight, Guyon, Philistinish in his total destruction of the place – but then, reading your reflection on the middle panel, I felt the conviction afresh of how insidious unbridled lust is (“the human impulse twisted into knots, all dignity rejected or forgot”). I’ve always been annoyed with those who see Adam and Eve’s “not knowing they were naked” as sexual repression, when in reality it meant the absence of shame in all aspects of relationships, including the act of procreation. Thanks again for honing my perspective here!
On one other note, “By stunted rays like searchlights misapplied” has got to be my favorite line – love the modern simile here which, to make a pun, feels quite aptly “applied.”
Your control of the form is marvelous, Jeffrey, and your images, in their own way, are as striking as Bosch’s
Outstanding use of language to conjure up images of the nether world and how mankind arrives. I am particularly struck by the last two last lines of your third poem, “Unendingly the crest of pleasure’s swell—A wave that breaks upon the shores of Hell.”
This is a great example of an ekphrastic piece, that takes a work of art as its theme, or as the vehicle for the exposition of ideas. So much endless blather has been written about what Bosch’s painting “really means” that is a delight to read a poem that presents a straightforward statement of its significance — a significance that would have been immediately clear to any intelligent viewer of the painting in Bosch’s day. God establishes the male-female sexual relationship as a facet of sacramental matrimony; fallen mankind turns unbridled sexuality into a crazed circus of fornication and sodomy; a chaotic and nightmarish hell is the consequence.
Very nice, Jeffrey, a modern Divine Comedy. I liked all three, ‘Hell’ the most.
I just can’t say enough good things about all the brilliance in this poem. There are so many exquisite and surprising lines and phrases; a few of my favorites are: “As mammals munch in happy fratricide”; “Of human impulse twisted into knots”; “Of sodomy inflicted with a rose”; “That thought it could from godly soul unmesh / Itself….” The consistency of the interesting rhyme scheme from section to section, and some of the really clever rhymes (beasts/arrivistes; preoccupied/fratricide; knots/squats) is impressive, along with new vocabulary for me (arrivistes; vitrified). Congratulations — this is a marvel.
Thank you, everybody, for your very kind comments, and blessed holidays to you all!
Jeffrey
Nicely interpreted, Jeffrey.
Quite a crowded triptych to cover in 20 lines for each panel, Jeffrey, but your selection of details is apt. I see Bosch denies the vegetarian peace of Eden prescribed by God’s assignment of plant food to both animals and men in Genesis 1. That makes the Eden panel a foreshadowing of fleshly human brutality. The animals are already acting against God’s word, but you contrast the arriviste human souls “naked as their skin.” And you note the intended sacramentality of their union with “Their Maker’s grace in twofold flesh distill.” The final lines of “Hell” make a good succinct summary of the process gone terribly awry. I especially like how your triptych is centered at the “lust/delight” couplet in the middle of the Garden. The work of art is a challenging subject well met by your poem.