Miranda and the Tempest by J.W. Waterhouse. General Domain.
I wanted to return to Miranda as a character I studied earlier in the year from Waterhouse. She was painted by J.W. Waterhouse, but she first appears in the Shakespeare play The Tempest. Her youth and her innocence make her appealing. I have mentioned Miranda before in my poetry, in LITTOP (Love in the Time of Plague, 2022).
Miranda
was seen offshore in a storm,
the
tempest was evidenced in the tide
of
spray against the lighthouse, ghostly-eyed
in
moonlight, through the wee hours of the morn.
A
sun would rise, its reddened rays would pierce
fog
of misconception, waiting for you:
become
a conceptual woman, too
tired
by the wind and its haze, coerced
no
longer by manipulative hands,
the
elements demand that you survive
in
deference to them and their dark wails.
—Emily Isaacson, LITTOP
This poem for 2024 has a new bent:
Tossed ashore like a white-warped mollusc shell,
Ferdinand
comes from the ship undeterred,
he
was separated from the others,
he
was rejected from the dire ship’s hull.
Son
of the king of Naples, he sees her:
Miranda,
clothed in sea, her hair with kelp,
is
small, and not without her father’s help,
she
is the tide upon the rock, inferred
that
she is only clothed in blue that’s spun,
her
kindly manner catches him off guard,
her
eyes, pure and deep as island tempest,
with
his stalwart song, he begins to win
the
beauteous girl with wrinkled sandy bar.
Her
father denies his only request.
—Emily Isaacson, "Da Capo Aria Miranda"
This poem, called a Da Capo Aria, I wrote in 10 stanzas. It was in Petrarchan Sonnet form, with a modified rhyme scheme, so every stanza has 14 lines of 10 syllables each. I submitted it for editorial feedback from Frontier Press and received the following 3 letters (excerpts are shown):
Letter 1:
Dear
Emily,
Thanks for sharing this with us and trusting us with your words. I want to mention right away that so much of getting poetry published is matching the personal and emotional feelings of the readers and editors at that specific moment. In no way should notes on your work from any editor discourage or dismiss your efforts as a poet. Please remember that I am just one opinion and poetry is inherently subjective. That being said, I will do my best to provide useful and tangible feedback here. I’m excited to dig deeper into “Da Capo Aria of Miranda.”
Overall, I found your poem to be vivid, evocative, and tactful. It’s very clear to me to that you are an observant and creative poet. I also really appreciate that you are responding to William Shakespeare and are interpreting his work in a new way while also paying homage to Shakespeare with the rhyme scheme and language. I typically would advise against a rhyme scheme but for this, it works well. I think this moment is my favorite:
“Miranda
and Ferdinand gazed then each
at
one another, swore their undying
love
from this life into the next, crying
sea,
next turquoise […]”
I love the use of color and the depiction of the sea crying. My main suggestion for this poem would be to add more intimacy...
Letter 2:
Hi Emily,
Thanks
for sharing this work with Frontier
Poetry. This is such a technical accomplishment! I’m so impressed by
this—there’s so much great stuff going on here, and I really admired the way
you were able to flesh out the story of The
Tempest, which actually is one of my fave Shakespeare plays. You manage to
evoke the spirit of the work so effectively here; there’s a lot to work with,
and thanks for working out that rhyme scheme—this is a really amazing
accomplishment from a technical perspective, and I think you should be really
proud of yourself. Linguistically, too, you’re such an inventive writer, and
this feels contemporary despite the subject matter. Well done.
...I want to keep complimenting your work, which is quite advanced, as well as
what you were able to do in a pretty small space. The Tempest, like all of Shakespeare, is pretty nuanced, and I
think you do a great job of capturing the subtlety here. To condense this play
into just five pages is pretty incredible, but you manage to keep the reader’s
attention and keep the pace, something I really admire... your work is a
little more complex and elevated, even stylized.
What drew you to this form? Form is something that, as a poet, I’m particularly interested in. I love this quote from poet Ocan Vuong ...
Letter 3:
Dear Emily,
Thank you for sending your poems for the 2023 Ekphrastic Poetry prize. It’s wonderful to connect with you and your work here at Frontier. I loved hearing about all the work and service you do in the poetry community through Potter’s Press and The Wild Lily Institute, as well as the courses you teach at the art gallery. And photography, too! So many interesting threads to weave into your work...
I absolutely love the syllabics and the rhyme schemes--and so much beautiful music in between, with lovely correspondences between words--the alliteration, assonance and consonance deftly done. Everything meticulously in its place.
I love the blue dress--that splash of
color at just the perfect moment.
And then the ending of that first
stanza at “dyes” Oh, that’s terrific!
In the second stanza I would change “T’was” because it is too self-conscious in its archaic--suddenly you see the artifice. Revise that out.
I love the temper/tempest and the wind
as a thoroughbred horse.
And best of all, “stately monsoon in
cursive” wow!
In the third stanza I would take out
“ere.”
Stanza 3’s language and image are less innovative and more straight-forward narrative. I think there’s room in here for some more image-work, especially using surprising language. I’ll drop links to examples of what I mean later in this letter.
In the fourth stanza I love the word “spoiled” there. I would add an “a” to the far away island and revise “niggardly” --it’s too archaic. Any outdated or archaic language draws too much attention to itself. Dropping articles like “a” and “the” is often something you learn in workshops, but it’s awkward usually. I would go back in and add any dropped articles. I love the cilantro!! That is a great moment.
The images are very vivid and clear.
Part II
The pacing, the sentences and syntax,
the storytelling is all very well done.
Stanza 2
I like the mollusc shell and the word “dire” and the kelp... I would change “maid” to “girl”.
All of my changes are for the purpose of moving the poem more in the direction of what editors at contemporary poetry journals like Frontier are looking for. There are many contemporary poets who are working with the classics and ancient mythology, but even if this is the subject, the craft of the poem and the language must take into account centuries of development and innovation-- I would look at these poets who either write on the same themes or are formal poets...
_____________________________________________
I thought you might like to see the kind of things editors say, and the revisions made were from these comments. Read the completed poem at my poetry blog here.
Sincerely,
Emily
