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    The Tragedy of Orpheus and the Maenads (and A Young Poet's Elegy to the Court of God)
    The Tragedy of Orpheus and the Maenads (and A Young Poet's Elegy to the Court of God)
    The Tragedy of Orpheus and the Maenads (and A Young Poet's Elegy to the Court of God)
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    The Tragedy of Orpheus and the Maenads (and A Young Poet's Elegy to the Court of God)

    By David Lane

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    Orpheus and the Maenads

     

    A Traditional Play in Blank Verse

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArouca Press
    Release dateAug 3, 2024
    ISBN9781998492046
    The Tragedy of Orpheus and the Maenads (and A Young Poet's Elegy to the Court of God)
    Author

    David Lane

    David Lane has written for The Guardian and the Financial Times, and since 1994 has been The Economist's business and financial correspondent for Italy. He has lived in Rome since 1972.

    Read more from David Lane

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      Book preview

      The Tragedy of Orpheus and the Maenads (and A Young Poet's Elegy to the Court of God) - David Lane

      PRAISE FOR PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED WORKS:

      The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth

      "Mr. Lane has seemingly come out of nowhere with this immensely impressive achievement. We owe it to him, we owe it to our fellow Catholics, we owe it to the English language, to read, promote and make better known The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth.

      This is a poem to be savored line by line for the elegance of its composition and the richness of its expression. Lines such as these have been written for the ages: Now, throwing o’er the sceptre royal, men seize / The pestle of democracy to mill / The family until it be a dust / Of sundered individuals that may / Be roused and huffed whence’er the wind of whim / Is setting—naked fore the stone-eyed state . . . . . . . Democracy / Is death, an enemy just yond that door." Thus does the King’s sister, Madame Elizabeth, predict not only the fate of Lewis, but that of Christian civilization at large.

      Acquire this work. Read it well. Teach it to your children. Recite it aloud together with them as the play it was written to be. Use it in your home school as a tool for the rediscovery and preservation of noble diction and high themes in an age of appalling linguistic brutishness. This work belongs on your shelf of classics, somewhere near the works of Shakespeare, as a most unexpected and quite wonderful contemporary revival of a literary tradition that was buried along with Christendom itself."

      —CHRISTOPHER A. FERRARA, Esq; Founder of The American Catholic Lawyers Association, pro-life activist, and prolific journalist

      "It is unbelievable that Mr. Lane wrote a tragedy of King Louis XVI. It is even more unbelievable that he wrote the play in blank verse, and it is overwhelmingly and delightfully shocking that he wrote the work in a mixture of archaic English drawing from words common across several hundred years of the language’s development.

      Mr. Lane’s attempt to craft a truly beautiful work is both ennobling of his subject as complimentary as it is challenging to his reader. Mr. Lane’s work is deeply and splendidly reactionary and written for the delight and edification of fellow reactionaries, but more importantly it is a tribute to a king, who, perhaps even more than the English Charles I, is a symbol of the death of an old order."

      —JESSE RUSSELL, Ph.D., writer for a variety of Catholic and secular publications

      "It is easy to become discouraged and disheartened by the current state of the arts. Appreciation of literature, art, and music in our day has almost become reduced to studying history. With the degeneration of every field of the arts on full display in what is oxymoronically referred to as modern culture, it is easy to conclude that no new art can be created in such a diseased society. Once and awhile something comes along to disprove this hypothesis (if only with an exception that proves a rule). David Lane’s The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth is just such a work."

      — PROFESSOR BRIAN MCCALL, Orpha and Maurice Merrill Professor at University of Oklahoma College of Law; Editor of The Catholic Family News

      Dido: The Tragedy of a Woman

      "David Lane’s verse tragedy Dido subtly adapts the classic tale from Virgil to a postmodern clash of culture—a clash between civilized people who honor reason and Natural Law and a barbarous people who give license to passion and demand child sacrifice. This clash is occurring today both globally and within our own borders. I found the play very thought-provoking."

      —†ANNE BARBEAU GARDINER, former Professor of English literature at John Jay College, CUNY, prolific author of scholarly books and articles

      "Dipping into the Western tradition in both subject and form, David Lane in Dido: The Tragedy of a Woman weaves another thread into one of the most essential stories in Western Civilization: the tragic love of Dido for the Trojan Aeneas. Mr. Lane’s command of the emotional life of his characters is triumphantly polished, at the same time he maintains a finely tuned pathos. In Dido Mr. Lane demonstrates a mastery of blank verse, building upon a keen musical sense developed in his equally delightful Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth. Dido: The Tragedy of a Woman is a rare work of civilized poetry."

      —DR. JESSE RUSSELL, Ph.D.

      "David Lane has done it again. He has resurrected in all its glory, and without affectation, the high yet elegantly simple diction of traditional blank verse to tell a tragic tale from the Aeneid. Read Dido: The Tragedy of a Woman and you will marvel at, even envy, this achievement."

      —CHRISTOPHER A. FERRARA, Esq.

      Copyright © David Lane 2023

      All rights reserved:

      No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted,

      in any form or by any means, without permission

      ISBN: 978-1-990685-59-0

      ISBN: 978-1-998492-04-6 (e book)

      Arouca Press

      PO Box 55003

      Bridgeport PO

      Waterloo, ON N2J 3G0

      Canada

      www.aroucapress.com

      Send inquiries to [email protected]

      On the cover:

      Nymphs finding the head of Orpheus,

      By John William Waterhouse,

      1900; private collection.

      DEDICATION

      Beatae Virgini Mariae Perdolenti.

      CONTENTS

      Preface

      THE TRAGEDY OF ORPHEUS AND THE MAENADS

      Glossary

      A YOUNG POET’S ELEGY TO THE COURT OF GOD

      MASTER NICHOLAS CONTRA MUNDUM

      PREFACE

      AFTER THE EXAMPLE of my two previously published verse plays, The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth and Dido: The Tragedy of a Woman, I have once more ventured into the faraway world of poetry, specifically that shining upward realm of super-rational verities that may be embodied in story. Again using regular traditional metrics and the traditional language of poetry, I here present a play calling forth one of the seminal stories of ancient Greek mythology. I have enlisted the figure of Orpheus, the preternaturally great poet who has haunted the imagination of Western man for millennia, to address in dramatic form the subject I first treated in my long poem A Young Poet’s Elegy to the Court of God. Accordingly, Orpheus and the Maenads is a poetical essay in literary criticism. I have retold the myth by way of addressing Imagism, the literary revolution that began with the men of 1914, who abandoning the rational aspect of poetry attempted to communicate subrational dream states apprehending the infinite, rather than imitate human action in stories conveying some transcendent (i.e., super-rational) truth embodied in the interpersonal doings of men and women.

      The reader approaching Orpheus and the Maenads should understand that it presents a tragic love story not at all depending on his having a scholar’s understanding of Imagism, though Eliot’s Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses will be more or less familiar to him.

      Following the play, I present the Young Poet’s Elegy, in which some twenty-five years ago I was bold enough (or presumptuous enough) to set forth a theory of poetry and what I rather briskly considered deviations from the recommended path. Hence the Elegy is itself a poetical essay in literary criticism, though in the form of a long discourse addressed first to the angels and then to Saint Thomas Aquinas. I critique the three types of Romanticism, (1) that of action (e.g., mediaeval romances), (2) that of the intellect (i.e., Mannerism), and (3) that of feeling (e.g., nineteenth-century Romanticism). Imagism is critiqued, as well as Surrealism and the like. By way of avoiding a possibly dull disquisition, I made the Elegy an extended metaphor or allegory involving a journey at sea.

      It is upon the foundation of this theory that I based my plays,

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