Naxos

She walks beside a blue, translucent bay.
Fishermen intently stitch their nets;
conspicuously, they glance the other way;
she feigns indifference, a fading coquette's
last resort. Once, for her, lithe athletes leapt
to pluck bright garlands from a wild bull's horn.
Then, as the unsuspecting city slept,
beguiled by Theseus, she eloped at dawn.
He jilted her at his first port of call.
Abandoned now, the blowsy concubine
of  Dionysus, does she recall,
amidst her wanton pleasure—nights of wine
sweet-talk and sex—that sad, expectant girl
who from the quay watched his dark sail unfurl.

I'm not sure why I ended up writing about Ariadne. In a note book, among pages of other material that never came to fruition, there are these two lines -

'Ignored and shunned, pretend you don't care.
The fishermen intently stitching nets'

These lines are clearly the starting point. I do remember walking past fisherman on the shore at Georgiopolis in Crete the previous October, also I have some holiday video of a harbour, I think at Erbalunga in Corsica, of a fisherman in his boat sitting stitching nets. A woman, obviously a tourist, wanders by and takes a few shots of the boats including the fisherman; he just stitches away without looking up at either the photographer or me. Maybe both these things were in the back of my mind when I scribbled these lines in my notebook.

The finished poem is a continuation of my attempts at the time to explore just how you might use the sonnet form to distill a story. I remember thinking about History Painting and the way Old Masters would attempt to encapsulate in one a single scene the essence of a story from mythology or history.

Type 'Ariadne' into Google images, and Titian's famous painting is one of the first things to come up; even though back then I was using 'Alltheweb' as a seach engine, I'm sure the result would have been similar, though some of the charms of latterday Ariadnes displayed alongside Titian's picture these days by Google may have not have been a feature back in 2002!  The way Theseus' ship is shown as a receding speck on the horizon must have influenced my thinking in the final couplet.

My solution to the problem of representing a big story in a small poem is to manipulate the timescales and incorporate two flashbacks. The 'present' in the poem sees Ariadne as older; some kind of ageing floozy, married to Dionysus - the fact that the fisherman 'stonewalls' her I suppose is meant to reflect the alarm that conventional society felt in both Greece and Rome at the cult of the Bacchanales whose orgiastic ceremonies were regarded as morally corrupt and politically subversive. Her current situation is also contrasted with her high status as a Minoan princess where athletes competed to pluck garlands from a wild bull's horn in homage to her. Ariadne's impulsive, 'wanton' nature is revealed in her love for Theseus, an enemy of the state, who she helps escape from the Minotaur. She elopes with Theseus only to be abandoned by him, at least according to some ancient accounts, on the adjacent island of Naxos where Dionysus, the god of wine, the grape harvest and ecstasy, falls in love with her and takes her as his wife.  

The couplet poses the question as to whether amid all the 'Carpe Diem' partying with Dionysus, Ariadne ever looked back on Theseus' treachery. The poem hinges on the words 'abandoned now' conflating Ariadne's actual abandonment by Theseus and her spiritual 'abandon' as queen of the Maenads.

Looking at the poem now, after more than a decade, I do wonder if it did work better in its first draft, written as a  second person narrative.

You walk beside a blue, translucent bay.
Fishermen intently stitch their nets;
conspicuously, they glance the other way;
you feign indifference, a fading coquette's
last resort. Once, for you, lithe athletes leapt
to pluck bright garlands from a wild bull's horn.
Then, as the unsuspecting city slept,
beguiled by Theseus, you eloped at dawn.
He jilted you at his first port of call.
Abandoned now, the blowsy concubine
of  Dionysus, do you recall,
amidst your wanton pleasure—nights of wine
sweet-talk and sex—that sad, expectant girl
who from the quay watched his dark sail unfurl.

I really am still in two minds about that.

The American poet, Rose Keheller, wrote to me to say that she could not read the couplet without feeling a 'tug at her heart'. It is a poem about regret and the way merriment is a solace against pain and disappointment. Allegedly Ernest Hemingway said that 'wine is the most civilised thing'. I've been reading recently a lot more about Epicurus and his followers, there's more to the pleasure principal than the pursuit of pleasure. This poem's theme is definately more Dionysian than Epicurean.