The Gift
To whom shall I send these,
the lilacs I’ve gathered,
in the cool of the morning?
To a dancing maiden,
or a withered crone?
Perhaps I should lay them
on altars dead Romans
raised to old Bacchus
in drunken frenzies.
Their perfume is fading,
the leaves are brittle,
the petals are shriveled.
I shall give them to Marcia,
she’s wilting and fading
like lilacs in the noonday.
Bacchanal -- Marc Chagall
Bacchanal -- Pablo Picasso
To whom shall I send these,
the lilacs I’ve gathered,
in the cool of the morning?
To a dancing maiden,
or a withered crone?
Perhaps I should lay them
on altars dead Romans
raised to old Bacchus
in drunken frenzies.
Their perfume is fading,
the leaves are brittle,
the petals are shriveled.
I shall give them to Marcia,
she’s wilting and fading
like lilacs in the noonday.
Bacchanal -- Marc Chagall
Bacchanal -- Pablo Picasso
Bacchus was the name the Romans gave to the Greek god Bakkhos (also known as Dionysos and Eleutherios “the liberator”). He was the son of Zeus and Semele the mortal daughter of Cadmus. Hera had Semele slain but Zeus rescued the unborn Dionysus by sewing him into his thigh. He was tutored by the centaur Chiron, from whom he learned chants and dances, the bacchic rites and initiations, and on his own, while still a child, he discovered how to extract wine from grapes. Hera made him mad and sent him wandering the Earth, and he conquered the whole world except Britain and Ethiopia while converting its inhabitants to his ecstatic religious practices. On his way to rescue Semele from Hades a shepherd named Prosymnus guided him to the entrance by rowing him to the middle of the bottomless Alcyonian Lake in exchange for being allowed to become his lover. He enabled his mother to be deified as Thyone, who presided over the frenzy inspired by her son. But before the god was able to return to Prosymnus he had died, so Dionysus carved a piece of fig wood into the shape of a phallus and, while seated on his tomb, used it to ritually fulfill his promise. Bacchus was the father of Priapos (protector of livestock, fruit plants, gardens, and male genitalia; cursed by Hera with ugliness, foul-mindedness, and inconvenient impotence -- he could not sustain an erection when the time came for sexual intercourse, despite his oversized penis). Bacchus was “the god that comes,” of epiphany and drama; his festivals evolved into Greek theater. The Bacchic rituals included practices such as pulling live animals apart and eating them raw in order to produce "enthusiasm" (etymologically, to let a god enter the practitioner's body or to become one with the god). Bacchus was conscripted into the official Roman pantheon as an aspect of Liber, the god of wine, fertility, and prophecy, and his festival was inserted into the Liberalia, a feast that celebrated the maturation of boys to manhood, celebrated with ribald songs. At first in Italia the Bacchanalia were held thrice a year and restricted to women, but they were corrupted by an Etruscan version into 5-times-a-month festivities in which drunken, uninhibited men and women of all ages and social classes cavorted in a sexual free-for-all. The Romans banned the Bacchanalia in 186 BCE, after reports of conspiratorial murders and poisonings, but they were revived in 50 BCE in a more moderate form.
ReplyDeleteGood! Yes, all us Marcias wilt and fade eventually! Once more, good poem! Wonderful, evocative images. Great, illustrations. As you probably know, Marc Chagall was crazy about his wife. All the women in his art were her. So wilting and fading doesn't necessarily mean too much. Thank God.
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