The Unturning Wheel

Another from A.E. Stallings, one of the lions of New Formalism, and a poet I can't get enough of. I have to admire anybody sticking up for rhyme and meter, allusion and classicism in contemporary American poetry. Mostly because it tends to invite harsh polemics from undergrads who think the world outgrew those tools in the late Victorian era. (As though the wheel never comes around again, the pendulum won't swing back.)


This one is very subtle, doesn't hit the meter particularly hard, very subtle slant rhymes. I think that's a sign of mastery, when you can make art that embodies your ideals without needing a sledgehammer to get your point across.

Implements from the “Tomb of the Poet”

A.E. Stallings

Piraeus Archeological Museum

On the journey to the mundane afterlife,
You travel equipped to carry on your trade:
A bronze, small-toothed saw to make repairs,
The stylus and the ink pot and the scraper,
Wax tablets bound into a little book.


Here is the tortoise shell for the cithara,
Bored through with holes for strings, natural sound box.
Here is the harp's wood triangle, all empty—
The sheep-gut having long since decomposed
Into a pure Pythagorean music.


The beeswax, frangible with centuries,
Has puzzled all your lyrics into silence.
I think you were a poet of perfection
Who fled still weighing one word with another,
Since wax forgives and warms beneath revision.