Goethite can be the ugliest rock
as if the Buchenwald close by Weimar
were just a tumescent broach on a Stock -
of average Mohs hardness for a miner
its oxides gilded the Gordian shroud
perhaps Knot - for Kojeve’s State takes an onion
( I peel you bleed I cry - but not out loud)
bloodies its welling bulb jolts its trunnions
from shot - Poetry leaves Axel’s Castle
and walks the wide world until it’s marooned
on metaphysics again (food parcels
and talk for comfort) - out on the lagoon
Goethe fastens the hawsers at menace
just so he can say ” I too knew Venice”
Blackwell’s
Oxford
19 August 2018
Goethite was indeed named after Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) in 1806, and archaeologists have established that the shroud of King Gordias of Phrygia, after whom the Gordian Knot was named, was stained in its oxides. A “stock” was one of those massive cravates worn in Goethe’s time. The Buchenwald concentration camp (cf Beech Forest) was just down the road from Weimar.
Alexandre Kojeve (1902-68) was the Russian-French political philosopher. Auguste Villers de l’Isle-Adam (1838-89) composed the Symbolist drama “Axel” which was published in 1890.
Goethe was one of the last great “students” of Venice, like Rousseau, who had been Secretary of the French Embassy to the Republic, or Joseph de Maistre and Simonde di Sismondi who brooded on it after its Fall. During his sojourn in 1790 Goethe composed the Venezianische Epigramme, which I like, modelled on Martial’s epigrams. The French Revolution had already started. Maybe I served him back his own medicine.
All lines as usual with my sonnets, have 9 or 10 syllables, so pronounce “perhaps” monosyllabically and onion and trunnion disyllabically !