The Lord’s Goodbye / Bertilak’s Ghazal and Antigone Regina

Abstract

With The Lord’s Goodbye / Bertilak’s Ghazal, I wanted to give myself the challenge of incorporating the Arthurian legend into the Medieval Persian ghazal form. The ghazal’s stylistic characteristics are incredibly fascinating and unique compared to traditional Western forms, especially the rhyming patterns. I realised I also found this stylistic distinctiveness in Medieval poems, notably ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, with its unique alliterative form. This poem draws similarities between the themes generally explored in a ghazal (abandonment, love, and religious imagery) and the story of Sir Gawain. I created a deliberate ambiguity between the two female characters, respectively described as her and Her (the capitalisation reinforcing the religious aspects of the Virgin Mary, who has a major role in the poem). The erotic connotations of Gawain’s relationship with Bertilak also helped with adapting the ghazal to the Arthurian genre. Through this poem, I hope to illustrate the malleability of the myth; a modern Arthurian retelling could deal with queer themes and interpretations, for example, or explore its influence outside of the Western psyche from a non-European perspective.

I wrote Antigone Regina to experiment with the triolet form and to expand on the father-daughter relationship in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. My favourite aspect of this form is the opportunity to make the same line take different meanings through the poem. The line ‘Oedipus’ grave and weeping blood’ plays on the word ‘grave’, hence the comma that appears in the last line. I also wanted to draw on the relationship that various retellings of the myth placed between humans and gods, as well as the role of ancestry and inheritance – not as a curse, but a fundamental part of human experience on both the individual and the societal level. Although this poem does not explicitly deal with the Arthurian story, it therefore still speaks of the role of poems as important reinterpretations of a myth.