"A poignant, yet hopeful lament over a dying metaphysic, upon which a bleak sun rises once again. Elegiac in the mode of enigmatic Old English works such as "the Wanderer" or "The Seafarer", the poem enacts its own collapse, and the collapse of the assumptions which sustained it, forcing them to their logical conclusion in the conclusion of their own logic, yet salvaging from the hermeneutical detritus a new and an Other logic." (Edna.)
Two Critical Approaches to Geoffrey's Poem "Untitled LVII"
With optimism tentative he ends
(Rather concludes contingently) his verse —
Which for its force ambivalent depends
Upon the text he is inclined to curse.
What can one say — "hypocrite!" is an option
It has been said so many times before!
Or else, "'Tis sport to see," (as in citation);
"The engineer hoist with his own petar."
It's certainly unfair to deconstruct it —
In metrical decay overdetermined
It lies in ruins utterly unstructured
Overambitious and unselfexamined.
Unlike itself it lies like certain fossils,
Last decadent product of its generation,
Like Keats's or like Sylvia Plath's Colossus
Not even adequate to its resignation.
Travestied, fragmented modernist text
Just failing, elegiac, to go down fighting
Suspended twixt one logic and the next
End of the book and the beginning of writing!
Dawn rose with her rosy fingers
Scattering her light across the land
Yet that hideous stench still lingers —
of corruption worse than the African rand.
The débris of discarded dogmas
Strewn across the floor
The works of failed philosophers
Thrown right of the door.
They had claimed it was no ideology
"A project only" they cried
However they offered no apology
To the thousands who yet had died.
"Iterability" was their rallying cry
Deconstruct or die
But no one stopped to ask "why?"
There was no one to stop the lie.
It ravaged throughout the land
Sweeping all in its path
Resistance to the text was aband-
oned for fear of its awful wrath.
And so I shall cease from my verse
Hesitant which way to turn
I fear lest my sanity get worse
When there's so much to learn
(shurely shome mishtake — Edna).
