Tristan & Isolde

Posted bywordsandcoffee1Posted inPoetry, W3 PromptsTags:, , , , 
the storm of love's intent
once content with play and ruse
now bound by tragic melody 
as strident calls echo in tune
two paired hearts so powerless
courting potion through to doom
the harmony of life's sunrise
now blurred by darkened clouds
but the weightless souls eternal
entwine beyond the sodden ground

I wrote this poem for this week’s We’ave Written Weekly at the Skeptic’s Kaddish. Leslie provided this week’s prompt, which is as follows:

Lesleyā€™s prompt guidelines

https://youtube.com/watch?v=M7DhVbUzTm8%3Fversion%3D3%26rel%3D1%26showsearch%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26iv_load_policy%3D1%26fs%3D1%26hl%3Den%26autohide%3D2%26wmode%3Dtransparent
  • Write an ekphrastic poem inspired by the music of Liebestod, the final, dramatic music from Wagnerā€™s 1859 opera ā€˜Tristan und Isoldeā€™, which you can listen to above;

Fun fact: I have a tattered copy of Tristan and Isolde that I collected from one of the “free book” shelves off the English department’s little corner of Wimberly Hall at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Back in my days as a nerdy English major, one of my favorite past times was to get a coffee from Murphy’s Mug (the cozy coffee shop embedded in the campus library) and then scope out the free bookshelves before class.

Bonus fun fact: From those same shelves, I also scored a giant hardcover anthology of Shakespeare’s plays that looked old enough to be the Bard’s personal copy. I used to scare my high school students by dragging it out of my filing cabinet at my first teaching job and pretending that we were going to have to read the original translation rather than their modern copies. I also had a pretty epic poster of Shakespearean insults up in that classroom, but I’ve since lost it…which is, perhaps, another tragedy.

19 thoughts on “Tristan & Isolde”

    1. šŸ˜… totally understandable! We watched some film versions and then some modern adaptations were fun, too! For instance, after reading “Romeo & Juliet”, we watched “Warm Bodies”, which is a modern comedy about zombies based loosely on that Shakespeare play. Then they got to make comparisons šŸ˜Š

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  6. Thank you for sharing this gorgeous poem, words ā€˜n ā˜•ļø. šŸ™
    I love this line! ā€œcourting potion through to doomā€.
    Iā€™d love a look through your old Shakespeare book. šŸ“–ā¤ļø

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