R.S.+Gwynn-Erickson+Bridges

=R.S. Gwynn=

**//The Easiest Room in Hell//**
What torments for the genteel sonneteers Whose praises ran, as streams of syrup flow, From critics (space reserved somewhere below) And Gentle Readers lodged in higher spheres? Prefacing phrase and clause with //Ah!// or //O!// They spoke as if the stems and stumps had ears, Letting the backwash of their idle tears Leave bathtub rings around the Vale of Woe.

They strove with none, and strummed their tuneless lyres Until the numbest ears had turned to stone, But, Lord, deal lightly with them, feed the fires With many drafts, and make them sweetly moan Nice sentiments, which echo from their crevice:

//Carpe diem!// //Ubi sunt?// //Ars longa, vita brevis.//

In his //The Easiest Room in Hell,// R.S. Gwynn describes the fate of the philosophers of Rome, doomed to never enter heaven due to their pagan beliefs. However, before we discuss the mechanics of this poem, first we must cover a little history behind this poem's subject.



In Roman and Greek mythology, when a just person died, his soul went to a section of the Underworld called Elysium, which was essentially the heaven of the classical age. When Christianity overtook Roman religion, however, this idea of the underworld devoted to great men remained. Perhaps the greatest example of this is found in Dante's //Divine Comedy,// in which Dante and the Roman poet Vergil journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. In //Inferno//, the first of the nine circles of Hell that the two come to is Limbo, Elysium under another name. Here, Dante meets the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans, as they are called, which includes everyone from the writer Horace to the mythological hero Orpheus to the conquerer Julius Caesar. But though Limbo is essentially Elysium, Dante includes his own Christian twist on the realm of Elysium: while life there may seem perfect, it is still in Hell, and those imprisoned there can never hope for union with God.

It is from the perspective of Dante that Gwynn writes this sonnet; indeed, its very construction as a Petrarchan sonnet in iambic pentameter is a reference to Italian poets, as Petrarch was also a medieval Italian poet. In fact, Gwynn litters this poem with references to the Classical era. For example, he mentions the practice of beginning epics with direct appeals to the Muses (e.g. "Sing, O Goddess, of the man and the arms..." -//The Aeneid// by Virgil). "They spoke as if the stems and stumps had ears" is a reference to epics' tendency to make direct addresses to inanimate objects, and his reference to "bathtub rings" is a slight reminder of the sanitary advances that the Romans and Greeks had long before our time.

But perhaps the greatest reference to the classics in this poem lies with the three Latin phrases at its end. All of these phrases come from the golden age of Rome, or at the very least with the Roman mindset present. //Carpe diem,// meaning "seize/pluck the day", comes from one of the //Odes// of Horace, a great Latin poet who wrote during the early years of the Empire. //Ubi sunt,// taken from a phrase meaning "where are those who came before us?", was a popular phrase amongst medieval Latin writers, and //ars longa, vita brevis,// meaning "art is long, life is short", is a Latin translation of a saying of the Greek physician Hippocrates.

In summary, //The Easiest Room in Hell// is a celebration of the ideas of classical and medieval literature and religion; though the allusions to the classics might be missed by some, they ultimately demonstrate the strength of R.S. Gwynn as a writer in the classical style.


 * //On the Threshold//**

One way out of this endless round of being— I’ve weighed and proven it with hand and eye. One quick stroke—and no prison wall is high Or thick enough to keep my soul from fleeing.

Even before the snoring guard can right His chair and fumble with the clumsy key, One quick stroke—and at last my soul is free And soaring upward in the starlit night.

What keeps these others going—faith, desire, Or hope—has slowly dwindled, leaving me Only this shadow play, this senseless revel.

Only, what holds me back? The threshold’s free. Yet I remain here, held against the fire In spite of all—by God or by the Devil.

In relation with //The Easiest Room In Hell//, //On the Threshold// also describes the imprisoned, only this time as a prisoner desperate to escape his bonds by any means necessary. A man poised on the edge of suicide gives a mental soliloquy as he tries and ultimately fails to inflict "one quick stroke".

The sonnet is greatly evocative of Shakespeare. The words and flow of the soliloquy sound just as if they came out of //Hamlet// or //Macbeth//, and Gwynn's use of iambic pentameter in a sonnet, both preferred forms of writing for Shakespeare, only helps to solidify this interpretation (As an example, here's one of my favorites is Hamlet's final soliloquy, [|found here]). Along those same lines, the poem is filled with light sounds, such as the flowing sounds of h's and o's, which gives it an almost whimsical yet breathless feeling. At the same time, negative words have a harsh, jarring sound, such as "clumsy key" and "senseless revel". Interestingly, "quick stroke" also has a harsh sound, which demonstrates some of the narrator's subconscious opposition to the suicide.

The poem, also much like //The Easiest Room In Hell//, deals with religion and spirituality as well. The narrator laments that he cannot free his soul and let it "soar...upward in the starlit night". Ultimately, the narrator cannot discern what holds him back from suicide--is God saving him, or is Lucifer torturing him? One of the motivations that the narrator states he lacks is "faith", giving him a viewpoint that, if not agnostic, at least views deities and spirits in a negative life. Prison life has broken him of all faith or hope in greater powers or morality; all that matters now to him is to end his life, though he cannot bring himself to that escape.

//The Dark Place//
In the dark place where I had come to piss I met my maker, and I heard him say: //No man alive deserves a death like this,//

//But you, for whom the serpent did not hiss// //Except in joy, shall have one. For today,// //In this dark place where we have come to piss,//

//The son of man you murder with a kiss// //Exacts the toll you shall be made to pay.// I asked, “And //I// deserve a death like this?”

He answered, //No. But nothing can dismiss// //The heat that comes by night, the cold by day,// //To this dark place where you have come to piss//

//Over the edge of life and that abyss// //Down which no light extends a blessed ray.// “Then who of us deserves a death like this?”

With that, he took my hand, as Beatrice Sent one to Dante who had lost his way In this dark place where we have come to piss, Where none of us deserves a death like this.

In his //The Dark Place//, R. S. Gwynn returns to Christian theology and myth with a stylized account of the death of Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus. Using Biblical references and imagery as well as intricate poetic structure, Gwynn creates a dark retelling of Judas' fatal fall.

God's statement (God being the assumed speaker of the italicized lines, seeing that the narrator addresses him as his "maker") that the narrator is he who "the son of man murder[s] with a kiss" immediately establishes that the narrator of the poem is none other than the Betrayer himself, Judas Iscariot. Indeed, the entire poem centers around one account of Judas' death. While the Book of Matthew accounts that Judas hanged himself in a field, the Acts of the Apostles 1:18 states "With the payment he received for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out." ([|Found Here]). It is this second account that Gwynn writes about; the death which "no man alive deserves" is this horrid death of a fall and literal explosion of the body.

Interestingly, Gwynn places hints of sympathy towards Judas' position throughout the poem. Most obvious is God's statement that "no man alive deserves a death like this/But you, for whom the serpent did not hiss/except in joy, shall have one". Gwynn also uses dark imagery of the cavern into which Judas falls, creating a sense that this cavern is too a foreshadowing of the hell that Iscariot will soon inhabit. In fact, God's imagery of "this dark place...over the edge of life and that abyss/down which no light extends but a blessed ray". This hellish imagery is made all the more relevant by Gwynn's explicit reference to Dante's //Inferno//, in that Judas descends into death "as Beatrice/sent one to Dante", which is in of itself a reference to Judas' fate depicted in //Inferno//: he and his kindred betrayer Brutus are doomed to be eternally eaten by Satan himself in the deepest circle of Hell.

This poem also uses the structure of a villanelle to draw across its main points. Originally a French poetry structure, the villanelle was adopted by English poets in the 19th century. Its structure is that of five tercets and a concluding quatrain, each containing only two possible rhymes. This rhyme structure of "a", "b", "a", is also marked by having special "a" lines that are repeated at the end of each tercet and creates the rhyming couplet at the end of the poem; specifically, these lines are "to this dark place where you have come to piss" and "no man alive deserves a death like this". By using this structure, Gwynn communicates his central ideas in this poem: the locale of Judas' death, and the morality of his death.

Through his use of poetic structure and Biblical images, Gwynn masterfully creates yet another depiction of religious death, returning to Christianity once more to show the demise of the most infamous of the twelve disciples. ===

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At the Center
The pianist is playing Debussy Beside the lobby cappuccino bar— Soft smiles and pastels everywhere.You see, The point’s not to remind you where you are Or //how// you are; the point is not to dwell On thoughts like these. Look at this normal crowd Such as you’d find in any good hotel. But why does no one say its name out loud?

Later you pass through elevator doors; Rising to higher levels, you recall Rumors you’ve heard of rumors from these floors— How some guests never leave, how they display A preference for short hair, or none at all, How no one asks how long you plan to stay.

In his poem //At the Center//, Gwynn uses musical and social allusions in the form of a sonnet to depict the coming and going of people ambling through the lobby of a reputable hotel.

Gwynn starts off his poem by setting the mood immediately with a reference to the composer Claude Debussy: "the pianist is playing Debussy/Beside the lobby cappuccino bar". After listening to some of Debussy's work, it becomes clear that Gwynn's reference is a clear attempt to establish the feel of the hotel lobby, alluding to sounds that he cannot express through poetry (for an example of Debussy, here's [|Clair de lune], perhaps his most famous work). In fact, listening to Debussy whilst reading this poem helps even further to create the lobby's feel and mood.

But what is the lobby's mood? The answer lies within the text. Positive, smooth words flow throughout the poem, creating a sense of weightlessness and peace; words like "soft smiles" and "thoughts like these" and even "Debussy" all have an uplifting, light sound to them. Gwynn even states that the lobby exists as a place where one floats away from questions of where and how; "the point is not to dwell/On thoughts like these". The lobby is a special place; "no one say[s] its name out loud" whilst in it, and the narrator can only pause on the future and fates of those around him after escaping into the elevator.

It is interesting to see the change in perspective that Gwynn gives concerning the hotel lobby. On the one hand, he seems at times to establish the lobby as a fluid place of peace, where one can leave behind his past; at the same time, however, the narrator's thoughts in the elevator imply that this existence is undesirable: though one may be free in the lobby, this freedom expresses itself as either permanence ("How some guests never leave"), odd behavior ("how they display/A preference for short hair, or not at all"), or ignorance of a world outside the lobby ("How no one asks how long you plan to stay").

Overall, //At the Center// marks itself amongst Gwynn's poems for its depiction of a nirvana on earth with both boons and curses, leaving it to the reader to decide whether it is better to remain in ignorant bliss or enlightened sorrow.