Roger Zelazny Poetry Month Overview

Here's the Final List:

1. For a Breath I Tarry – A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman
2. The Last Defender of Camelot – Sir Galahad by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
3. Eye of Cat – A Blessing by Luci Tapahonso
4. Godson – Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
5. Creatures of Light and Darkness – The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats
6. The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth – The Kraken by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
7. Divine Madness – To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell
8. Comes Now the Power – Still I Rise by Maya Angelou
9. Damnation Alley – Invictus by William Ernest Henley
10. Nine Princes in Amber – Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
11. A Rose for Ecclesiastes – Ecclesiastes 
12. Lord of Light – The Upanishads
13. And Call Me Conrad (This Immortal) – Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley
14. Jack of Shadows – Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
15. The Guns of Avalon – La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats
16. The Changing Land – The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe
17. Home is the Hangman – The Tyger by William Blake
18. 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai – Death poem by Bashō
19. He Who Shapes – The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
20. Isle of the Dead – When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats
21. The Graveyard Heart – Love After Love by Derek Walcott
22. The Force That Through the Circuit Drives the Current – The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower by Dylan Thomas
23. Roadmarks – Roads by Edward Thomas
24. Doorways in the Sand – When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman
25. Permafrost – What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why by Edna St. Vincent Millay
26. Deus Irae – God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins
27. The Courts of Chaos – Correspondences by Charles Baudelaire
28. Donnerjack – The Distance That the Dead Have Gone by Emily Dickinson
29. Love is an Imaginary Number – Paradise Lost by John Milton
30. A Night in the Lonesome October – Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe

Overall, it wound up being more difficult than I expected, but I broadened my horizons as part of the process and I'm happy for having done it. 

30 April - Roger Zelazny Poetry Month - A Night in the Lonesome October

Stupid April for only having 30 days.

It really ought to have 31, just to match A Night in the Lonesome October a little better. 

And after all, Ulalume gave the story its name. It’s only fair.

The parallels are baked in. Both the poem and the novel take place in a landscape shaped by grief, memory, and moonlight. Both are narrated in first-person by someone (or something) keeping secrets. Both rely on rhythm, atmosphere, and slow-building dread.

Poe’s narrator wanders through the haunted woods of October. Zelazny’s characters do the same, though their woods are filled with familiars, rituals, and the threat of something larger breaking through. Ulalume is dreamlike and mournful; Lonesome October is playful but melancholy underneath. They rhyme in tone, if not in structure.

It’s a perfect closing for April, even if the month doesn’t quite give us all the time we want. Cruelest month, indeed.

The skies they were ashen and sober;

      The leaves they were crispéd and sere—

      The leaves they were withering and sere;

It was night in the lonesome October

      Of my most immemorial year;

It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,

      In the misty mid region of Weir—

It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,

      In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Here once, through an alley Titanic,

      Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—

      Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.

These were days when my heart was volcanic

      As the scoriac rivers that roll—

      As the lavas that restlessly roll

Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek

      In the ultimate climes of the pole—

That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek

      In the realms of the boreal pole.

Our talk had been serious and sober,

      But our thoughts they were palsied and sere—

      Our memories were treacherous and sere—

For we knew not the month was October,

      And we marked not the night of the year—

      (Ah, night of all nights in the year!)

We noted not the dim lake of Auber—

      (Though once we had journeyed down here)—

We remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,

      Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

And now, as the night was senescent

      And star-dials pointed to morn—

      As the star-dials hinted of morn—

At the end of our path a liquescent

      And nebulous lustre was born,

Out of which a miraculous crescent

      Arose with a duplicate horn—

Astarte's bediamonded crescent

      Distinct with its duplicate horn.

And I said—"She is warmer than Dian:

      She rolls through an ether of sighs—

      She revels in a region of sighs:

She has seen that the tears are not dry on

      These cheeks, where the worm never dies,

And has come past the stars of the Lion

      To point us the path to the skies—

      To the Lethean peace of the skies—

Come up, in despite of the Lion,

      To shine on us with her bright eyes—

Come up through the lair of the Lion,

      With love in her luminous eyes."

But Psyche, uplifting her finger,

      Said—"Sadly this star I mistrust—

      Her pallor I strangely mistrust:—

Oh, hasten! oh, let us not linger!

      Oh, fly!—let us fly!—for we must."

In terror she spoke, letting sink her

      Wings till they trailed in the dust—

In agony sobbed, letting sink her

      Plumes till they trailed in the dust—

      Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.

I replied—"This is nothing but dreaming:

      Let us on by this tremulous light!

      Let us bathe in this crystalline light!

Its Sybilic splendor is beaming

      With Hope and in Beauty to-night:—

      See!—it flickers up the sky through the night!

Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,

      And be sure it will lead us aright—

We safely may trust to a gleaming

      That cannot but guide us aright,

      Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,

      And tempted her out of her gloom—

      And conquered her scruples and gloom:

And we passed to the end of the vista,

      But were stopped by the door of a tomb—

      By the door of a legended tomb;

And I said—"What is written, sweet sister,

      On the door of this legended tomb?"

      She replied—"Ulalume—Ulalume—

      'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"

Then my heart it grew ashen and sober

      As the leaves that were crispèd and sere—

      As the leaves that were withering and sere,

And I cried—"It was surely October

      On this very night of last year

      That I journeyed—I journeyed down here—

      That I brought a dread burden down here—

      On this night of all nights in the year,

      Oh, what demon has tempted me here?

Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber—

      This misty mid region of Weir—

Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber—

      In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."

Said we, then—the two, then—"Ah, can it

      Have been that the woodlandish ghouls—

      The pitiful, the merciful ghouls—

To bar up our way and to ban it

      From the secret that lies in these wolds—

      From the thing that lies hidden in these wolds—

Had drawn up the spectre of a planet

      From the limbo of lunary souls—

This sinfully scintillant planet

      From the Hell of the planetary souls?"

29 April - Roger Zelazny Poetry Month - Love is an Imaginary Number

This is one of the stories where the poem came first.

Love is an Imaginary Number isn't one of Zelazny's best known or most loved stories, but there is something about it that calls to me.

I do love Milton's writing. When I started putting this list together, one of my favorite phrases in the English language came to mind: Awake, arise, or be forever fallen. That line alone might have been enough to get Paradise Lost on the list. It’s a rallying cry and a warning, all at once.

Zelazny draws from the same well. He calls on Loki and Lucifer to populate Love is an Imaginary Number with their metaphors. It’s a story about defiance and identity, about the masks we wear and the roles we’re handed. It’s brief, strange, and deliberately slippery.

Milton gives us a devil who chooses rebellion over submission. Zelazny gives us something less straightforward but just as sharp. The pairing works not because the story tries to match Paradise Lost in scope, but because it glances in the same direction and smiles.

He call'd so loud, that all the hollow Deep

Of Hell resounded. Princes, Potentates

Warriers, the Flowr of Heav'n, once yours, now lost,

If such astonishment as this can sieze

Eternal spirits; or have ye chos'n this place

After the toyl of Battel to repose

Your wearied vertue, for the ease you find

To slumber here, as in the Vales of Heav'n?

Or in this abject posture have ye sworn

To adore the Conquerour?   who now beholds

Cherube and Seraph rowling in the Flood

With scatter'd Arms and Ensigns, till anon

His swift pursuers from Heav'n Gates discern

Th' advantage, and descending tread us down

Thus drooping, or with linked Thunderbolts

Transfix us to the bottom of this Gulfe.

Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n.

28 April - Roger Zelazny Poetry Month - Donnerjack

If Eye of Cat is the story I don't like as much it deserves, then Donnerjack is its antithesis, my affection for it out of proportion (some would say) with its actual merit.

Those who say such things are wrong.

Today's poem is another by Emily Dickinson. 

The Distance That the Dead Have Gone reflects the themes of digital afterlife, separation, mourning, and blurred boundaries between the living and the dead that Donnerjack explores. I do love this book. The generational sweep of it gives it a more epic feel than I believe the originally intended trilogy would have had.

The distance that the dead have gone

Does not at first appear —

Their coming back seems possible

For many an ardent year.

And then, that we have followed them,

We more than half suspect,

So intimate have we become

With their dear retrospect.

27 April - Roger Zelazny Poetry Month - The Courts of Chaos

 Moving right along. Footloose and fancy free. 

Today we have The Courts of Chaos. Specifically, the segment where Corwin traces his own pattern, remembering his time in Paris in 1905 and perhaps infusing it with some of his memories. 

 . . Cassis, and the smell of the chestnut blossoms. All along the Champs-Elysies the chestnuts were foaming white . . . 
    I remembered the play of the fountains in the Place de la Concorde. . . . And down the Rue de la Seine and along the quais, the smell of the old books, the smell of the river. . . . The smell of chestnut blossoms...
    Why should I suddenly remember 1905 and Paris on the shadow Earth, save that I was very happy that year and I might, reflexively, have sought an antidote for the present? Yes . . .
    White absinthe, Amer Picon, grenadine . . . Wild strawberries, with Creme d'Isigny . . . Chess at the Cafe de la Regence with actors from the Comedie Francaise, just across the way . . . The races at Chantilly . . . Evenings at the Boite a Fursy on the Rue Pigalle . . .. . . And, as the Pattern in Rebma had helped to restore my faded memories, so this one I was now striving to create stirred and elicited the smell of the chestnut trees, of the wagonloads of vegetables moving through the dawn toward the Hallos. . . . I was not in love with anyone in particular at the time, though there were many girls-Yvettes and Mimis and Simones, their faces merge-and it was spring in Paris, with Gipsy bands and cocktails at Louis'. . . . I remembered, and my heart leaped with a kind of Proustian joy while Time tolled about me like a bell. . . . And perhaps this was the reason for the recollection, for this joy seemed transmitted to my movements, informed my perceptions, empowered my will. . . .

Who to match with it? None other than Baudelaire!

Correspondences 

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.

There are a number of English translations, but this is my preference.

Nature's a fane where down each corridor

of living pillars, darkling whispers roll,

— a symbol-forest every pilgrim soul

must pierce, 'neath gazing eyes it knew before.

like echoes long that from afar rebound,

merged till one deep low shadowy note is born,

vast as the night or as the fires of morn,

sound calls to fragrance, colour calls to sound.

cool as an infant's brow some perfumes are,

softer than oboes, green as rainy leas;

others, corrupt, exultant, rich, unbar

wide infinities wherein we move at ease:

— musk, ambergris, frankincense, benjamin

chant all our soul or sense can revel in.