By March 5, a day after our deadline, the NLP team had produced 122 responses to our February 21 post (“Muse Circe Reclaims Her Lucre“) and its five new prompts, based on five infernal axioms from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell.” The new poems surprised and delighted this reader, and the critical exchanges between poets matched an ineffable generosity of spirit with expert analyses.

The poem “Beginning with a Line by William Blake” by the possibly pseudonymous Greg Chaimtov (whose last name combines the Hebrew words for “to life” and “good”) impressed me with its daring use of rhyme. It begins by endorsing Blake’s line (“The nakedness of woman is the work of God”) and follows through, for the next seven lines, on the argument that instinctive desire defeats reason. But then, as if the rhymes drive the content of the poem, images of beauty (“a maple-red dawn, / the first flakes feathering fallen leaves”) ensue before giving way to an inevitable “but.” The poem boldly concludes by rejecting its own initial premise:

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
How else to explain the desire to worship desire?
To drop to your knees as if a power higher
than any you’ve known has fought
its way past the defenses Reason
built for you over those many years
you devoted to getting through one season
to the next without ending in tears
at fireflies kindling lawns, a maple-red dawn,
the first flakes feathering fallen leaves,
or a songbird nestled under the eaves?
But then, when you cannot rise and go on
as you had before, you wonder if, after all,
Blake, mad as he was, was simply wrong.

 

For the rest of the post, and the new prompts, click here.
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-nakedness-of-woman/