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.
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.