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This blog ran for more than two years with no graphics--and it received about 50 page views. I was advised to add graphics; after seeing the huge public that followed blogs dedicated to homoerotic images, I decided to use that kind. The result was a dramatically increased number of monthly page views, and the number has remained fairly steady. Most of the images were found on the internet; although they are assumed to be in the public domain, they are identified as far as possible. They are exhibited under the Fair Use protections of United States copyright law: their function is simply to attract readers to the poems--I receive no economic benefit from them or from the blog. Nevertheless, they will be removed if they are copyrighted and the owner so desires. 1260 x 290

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Thursday, May 15, 2014

A SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY circa 1960


For Richard, dead these thirty years; 
and for Emory, who never knew   



Under the aegis of the Lyceum,
with its always freshly white-washed columns,
lantern, and lilac-painted clock
that shows that, apparently, time has stopped,

They come (whose great-granddaddies whooped,
spurring their horses through the hallowed portals)
and pose beneath the trees, dusty and beautiful.
 
 
White thighs flashing on the Green expose,
to other eyes than those of love,
Olympian splendor in the grass, almost
a nude Déjeuner dans le Grove.
 

“Isn’t this just like living in a magazine?”
said my friend Emory one day,
from the venerable School of Law’s
high portico, and I agreed. . . . 

Into the seventeenth century
the Parthenon survived intact
until, in one of the Med’s interminable wars,
a mortar bomb soared through the air and crashed
into that most unstable of charges, black
powder, they had stockpiled there,
and the Pan-Athenaic chivalry of Greek youth     
blew everywhere. 
                                 Well, they say
nothing is staler than last week’s news,
and even this generation will pass away. 
 




http://nbmaa.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/reinterpreted-artworks-le-dejeuner-sur-l%E2%80%99herbe-by-edouard-manet/ 


http://www.ebay.com/itm/Shirtless-Male-College-Student-Shorts-Laying-Down-on-Grass-PHOTO-PINUP-4X6-P720-/400691477845    
 
https://aristotleguide.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/blowing-up-the-parthenon/
https://aristotleguide.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/the-destruction-of-the-parthenon/ 
 

3 comments:

  1. What a beautiful memory and so true the words.

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  2. The line “Olympian splendor in the grass” fuses a number of things. “Olympian” (as in the Greek gods on Mount Olympus) alludes to both the privileged jocks, who harbor aspirations to win in the Olympic Games, and the fraternity boys (“Greeks”)—the campus gods who require that their superiority be admired, envied, and deferred to by the lower orders. But it alludes as well to the nude in Manet’s hedonistic “Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” which portrays the nude body of Manet’s then-mistress, who was also the model for the nude courtesan in his painting “Olympia.” Here the emphasis is on the flaunting of beautiful bodies. The phrase “splendor in the grass” is one of the images used by Wordsworth in his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” to express the luminous world of childhood and youth (of which this university is one example) that is destroyed by time. It also alludes to the movie (starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty) that has the same theme, and the same phrase as its title.

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