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/
Note:
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.
