Apollo and Marsyas, and Other Poems — A Closer Reading

The Marsyas Principle in Diction and Voice

Lee-Hamilton's language frequently leans toward the 'wild fitful voice' he attributes to Marsyas. In 'Sister Mary of the Plague,' the nun's speech is laced with physical horror: 'the life-blood half has oozed' and 'limbs that on thee weigh / Grow more rotten day by day.' The vocabulary is visceral, favoring words like 'gory,' 'pestiferous,' and 'benumbed.' This contrasts with the more measured, classical diction of poems like 'A Pageant of Siena,' where the city 'sleeps' in 'the August glare.' Yet even there, the description of 'livid furrowed hillocks' and 'huge-horned pair' of oxen introduces a roughness that undercuts the picturesque. The poet's voice oscillates between these registers, often within a single poem, as if enacting the very competition he describes.

Structure as a Mirror of Duality

The collection's formal variety—from the irregular stanzas of the title poem to the tight sonnet sequences—reflects its thematic opposition. The sonnets, such as 'Idle Charon' and 'Lethe,' adhere to strict Petrarchan or Shakespearean forms, their compression forcing a clarity that the longer, looser poems resist. In 'A Pageant of Siena,' the repeated refrain 'The old red, towered walls climb round the hills' anchors a poem that otherwise moves freely between present stillness and imagined past clamor. This structural oscillation mirrors the 'endless competition' between Apollo's order and Marsyas's wildness. The poet's choice to place the sonnet sequence after the longer narrative poems further emphasizes a shift from expansive to concentrated expression.

Recurring Motifs: Light, Darkness, and the Body

Throughout the collection, light and darkness are not merely atmospheric but charged with moral and aesthetic significance. The introduction speaks of 'radiant noontide' and 'twilight' as competing forces. In 'Sister Mary of the Plague,' the 'dark Colossus' and 'gory Imperial bed' literalize this opposition in political and physical terms. The body appears frequently as a site of contest: the flaying of Marsyas, the 'benumbed and bruised' form of Poland, the 'gleaming limbs' of racehorses in Siena. Lee-Hamilton's imagery often dwells on surfaces—'marble and gold,' 'crimson hangings'—but also on what lies beneath: 'the dark Siberian mines,' 'the grave in which they lie.' This tension between surface and depth, health and decay, runs as a constant undercurrent.

The Italian Poems: Place as Palimpsest

Two poems, 'A Pageant of Siena' and 'An Ode of the Tuscan Shore,' engage directly with Italian settings. 'A Pageant of Siena' is notable for its layered temporality: the present-tense description of a 'silent and empty' city gives way to a vivid reconstruction of medieval pageantry, complete with named districts (Panther, Eagle, She-Wolf) and sensory details ('clarions peal,' 'crimson hangings'). The poem's refrain anchors this shift, suggesting that the walls themselves hold memory. The diction here is more ceremonial, with phrases like 'gaudy pageantry' and 'motley blazonry,' yet the underlying note of loss is unmistakable. Lee-Hamilton does not simply romanticize the past; he emphasizes the 'depopulated' present, the 'creaking' carts, the 'dusty gates.' The Italian poems thus function as meditations on time and ruin, filtered through a precise topographical eye.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to the interplay between its formal control and its thematic wildness. Lee-Hamilton's verse rewards attention to word choice and structure, where a single adjective can shift a line from Apollonian clarity to Marsyan turbulence. The poems do not resolve the contest they announce; instead, they stage it repeatedly, in different keys and settings. This makes the volume less a unified statement than a series of experiments in poetic voice, each testing the limits of its own medium.

That old Lee-Hamilton collection stayed with me—that ache between Apollo's perfect lyre and Marsyas's raw pipe, how skill and suffering can't be separated. I kept thinking about that duality, the way one voice must drown another. It reminded me of something quieter but similar in Deirdre wed and other poems — Key Ideas to Explore, where longing itself becomes the poem. I still feel both of them now, softly.