St. Cecilia

My eyes, blue pupils—iris, red as blood, 

have sought a true path through the garden ways,

and fled the laurel’s shadow and its blaze—

while lions roared, I played the cello bowed.

I gold-marked my place inside a old book,

and poets, songwriters, and lyricists,

were examined by my ready physics:

for dexterity, vision, ordered flutes.

What love has descended to music’s mouth?

Mouthpiece to breathe upon, with trill unsure,

would bless orchestra’s liturgical red.

Then touch Cecilia Rose’s bloom—myrrh roof:

the shelter in our pain that waits for cure,

while raising us unaware from our beds.

—W.E. Isaacson

Poetry Analysis:

In St. Cecilia, music becomes both vocation and passage: a discipline by which the speaker searches for a “true path” through a symbolic garden of danger, tradition, and revelation. The Petrarchan sonnet form gives this pilgrimage an inherited sacred architecture, while the slant rhymes loosen that architecture just enough to suggest music heard at a distance—echoed rather than perfectly resolved. The opening octave gathers intensely sensuous emblems: the blood-red iris, the laurel, the roaring lions, the bowed cello, the gold-marked book. Poetry, music, bodily skill, and vision are placed under examination, as though artistic creation itself were a kind of spiritual physics. The speaker does not merely listen to music; she tests its makers for “dexterity, vision,” seeking the point at which technique becomes something more mysterious than technique.

The sestet turns toward that mystery with the question, “What love has descended to music’s mouth?” Here St. Cecilia, patron saint of music, becomes less a historical figure than a principle of sacred listening: breath enters the mouthpiece, uncertain trills become blessing, and the orchestra assumes the ceremonial colour of liturgy and sacrifice. Rose and myrrh deepen the devotional symbolism, joining beauty to burial, fragrance to suffering, and cure to pain. The poem finally suggests that music does not necessarily remove suffering; it shelters the sufferer within it, quietly performing a resurrection of consciousness. Its closing image—being raised “unaware from our beds”—makes Cecilia’s music almost sacramental: an unseen force by which the wounded are lifted before they even understand that healing has begun.

—Analysis provided by WLI

St. Eulalia

O my love, pardon my love on the ground.

Saint Eulalia, wreathed by winter’s shroud,

from your mouth flew doves, as spirit from cloud,

lamentations kind, your cross on this mound—

O my love, pardon my love crucified

by Roman hook, the wound upon your breast,

when refusing worship, offering-less

to pagan gods, now beaten in a sign.

O arms outstretched, pardon my evil hurt,

that you may rest observed, diametric

with burning hair below pillar’s marble,

and suffocating altar incense’s spurt,

smoke, trailing toward their heaven, rejected

in their sin as at the Fall and startled.

—W.E Isaacson

Destiny

Where ships sail into the lapis harbour

there is a mirror of tranquility,

now ask soothsayer, youthful destiny . . .

though prophecy laps globe, tincture water.

Here dwells no little black lamb: but brother

who in bitterness deserts harmony—

yet like a rhododendron, grows in peace

toward the sun, with five petal daughters

fused at a jewelled base in calyx green,

blotting out the sun of sixth earth effaced,

poisoning bees until they are toxin-

laced: enlisted, they produce mad honey—

the locals’ remedy—hallucinate—

a hostess’s golden drops, so rich as sun.

W.E. Isaacson

The Orchard

What I held out in the starry orchard:

redstarts on split bark, hollow trunks, rot holes,

aged wind, boisterous in the leaves, hollows,

rippling down verdant canopy of gnarled

branches reaching out as if days passing

in blossoms pristine and pure, grafter’s quest—

lichens’ range wrapped the woman in a dress,

while sun’s rays level themselves through her leaves,

and the nut trees sing in bright vibrato,

white corps de ballet bends in arabesque.

Apple cider is bottled William Blake,

over grassland rife with wildflower notes,

then Brahms waltzes to my inner silence—

I am as still as glass Bassenthwaite Lake.

W.E Isaacson