E.J. HUTCHINSON is Associate Professor of Classics and Director of the Collegiate Scholars Program at Hillsdale College (Hillsdale, Mich.). His poems and translations have appeared in First Things, New Verse Review, National Review, and elsewhere.

“Mars Hill”

The nearer sun beats down upon the bare

And desiccated Areopagus.

The mind on this unfeeling polished tomb

Refuses—will not feel that ever here

The Furies hunted Agamemnon’s son.

What ghost from underground could bear such light

Unshadowed by a mediating god?
It beggars all belief that these would come

Exposed to drink Orestes’ guilty blood.

---

But suddenly a breath of clammy wind,

A passing cloud that blunts the sun, a wisp

Of cigarette smoke floating past, and all

Is changed, the cry of blood to blood seems near,

Seems almost audible.

---

                                     But it is just

A momentary alteration in

The air, and it is gone.

---

                                     Returns Apollo,

The nearer, bloody sun, and with a groan

Beneath the earth flees justice to await

Some other deity, some other sun.

“The Arrival of Dionysus” (Euripides, Bacchae 1-63)

I come, a child of god, to Theban lands:

Dionysus, whom Semele once bore,

Induced betimes by lightning-bearing fire;

Now giving up the god for mortal form,

I’m present at my native riverside.

I see my mother’s smoldering cenotaph,

The smoking ruins of her bridal hall

Nearby, the vital flame of Zeus’s fire,

The fruit of Hera’s outrage, undying.

But Cadmus makes this precinct sacrosanct:

For this, my praise. And I myself, with greenery of vine,

Have hidden all around this haunted place.

---

I’ve left behind the many-gilded lands

Of Lydians and Phrygians, the sun-

Baked plains of Persia, passed through Bactria,

Perilous Media, Arabia

The spice-rich; Asia, too, which lies beside

The salted sea, demesne of cities whose

High-towered walls embrace barbarians

With Greeks. At last I’ve come to Greece, and first

To Thebes—those foreign climes now dance for me—

To manifest myself a god to men.

---

Yes, first of this Greek land it’s Thebes I’ve raised

With cries, donning the fawnskin on my shoulders,

Taking the thyrsus, ivy spear, in hand,

Because my aunts, who should’ve had more sense,

Denied that Dionysus sprang from Zeus.

They said that Semele, pregnant from some affair,

Pawned off on Zeus her sordid bedroom sin—

Cadmean sophistries—and due to this

Alleged deceit about her mate, Zeus killed her.

Therefore, I’ve spurred these women, mad, from home;

They dwell, now witless, on the mountainside.

I’ve forced them to put on the vestments of

My rites. The rest of Thebes’s female seed

I’ve driven mad from their homes, too.

Mixed indiscriminately with the daughters

Of Cadmus, under trees they sit on roofless

Rocks. For this stubborn city spurns my rites

And has to learn its lesson. Semele,

My mother, I’ll defend (I must), made plain

To mortals as the god she bore to Zeus.

---

Cadmus, then, gives honor and right of rule

To Pentheus, born of my daughter; he

Starts war with heaven over me and drives

Me from libations, me remembers not

In prayer. For these slights I’ll reveal myself

A god to him and Thebes. Hence to another

Land I’ll go, having set things in good order,

Revealing myself. But if Thebes attempts,

Impassioned, armed, to drive my Bacchants from

The mountain, I will lead a Maenad army

In holy war. I’ve taken on man’s shape,

Therefore: his nature in exchange for mine.

---

So, then, O women, you who’ve left behind

Mount Tmolus, Lydian stronghold, my sacred

Barbaric band, my hand-picked ministers

And friends, take up your native Phrygian drums,

Inventions of mother Rhea and me.

Then, come and stand around this royal house

Of Pentheus; thunder so all the city

Of Cadmus sees; but I will come to where

My Bacchants are—Cithaeron’s glens—to dance.

“When You Shall See Me in the Toils of Time”

After Thomas Hardy

When you shall see me in the toils of time,

The snares of meter reinforced by rhyme,

Staring at a page too shy to yield

And blankly fallow like an unplowed field,

One I can set no fruitful furrow in

To order my mistakes and what has been,

Be not amazed. Such aporia holds

The mirror up to nature. Do not scold,

Therefore. As observation’s lowly wife,

My art is only imitating life.