Epigrams
Epigrams - meaning Summary
Myth Figures as Inner States
The poem uses classical mythic figures to map human states: healing and immortality, sleep and wakefulness, forgetfulness, desire, restraint, and futile striving. Each deity or cursed hero embodies a psychological condition—Bacchus for forgetting, Endymion for postponed immortality, Tantalus and Sisyphus for thwarted desire and labor—while the speaker seeks an artful ecstasy that purifies rather than consumes. It reads as a compact meditation on balance between passion and self-control.
Read Complete AnalysesAsclepius lays his hands on the silence around the body then listens for the sound he knows so well, of immortality. Actual life or death is not his business. Endymion sleeps forever, postponing immortality which is an intensity of wakefulness. Bacchus has mixed water from the river Lethe with these crushed grapes: each small lapse rehearses the longer forgetting. Yesterday, you were Silenus; last night, Priapus… O Apollo, do you not know how beautiful you are? Dionysus, play your part in what I seek: ecstasy without indulgence, a shriven joy I want to be happy, but not fat. Tantalus is the pleasure principle defeating itself; Sisyphus, the futile triumph of the work ethic. Help us to find the music, Orpheus, not to enchant into movement trees and rocks and plants, but to leave them be.
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