My name is Calypso And I have lived alone
Calypso by Suzanne Vega, still telling tales of the hero Odysseus (800 BCE) in the 21st century.
I live on an island And I waken to the dawn
A long time ago I watched him struggle with the sea
I knew that he was drowning And I brought him into me
Now today Come morning light
He sails away
After one last night
I let him go
The ancient poems that we know were written down, which dates them from @2100 BCE onward. Few people actually read them aside from the kings, priests, or scribes, since very few could read. The earliest poems we know were meant to be said aloud, told as stories. Surely, you can picture the poet–man or woman–standing in the firelight, weaving words of magic in front of an audience as it dozes from the wine and the heat of a Mesopotamian summer night. Perhaps the poet’s eyes gaze at something above the listeners’ heads, maybe at the sparks of firelight that dance above the dark and form shapes of heroes and heroines, of lovers and fighters, whose tales sink into the dreams of the drowsy.
Most of the poems written long ago lost the battle of centuries. Much of what we have are cobbled-together bits and pieces from tablets crumbled away or papyrus half-shredded. None of it was originally written in English. Whatever we have is filtered: patched back together, translated, missing bits filled in, with interpretative decisions about lines, rhyme schemes, word choice. We have to accept it as is.
What we do have are tales of warriors, seekers of fortune who end up finding hard truths, lovers embracing in liquid splendor or weeping in loneliness when bitter words are exchanged. Multiple languages, disparate voices–all expressing similar ideas about the human condition. As with other explorations of Ancient Inventions, I want to ask:
- What defines a Poem?
- What the earliest examples of Poetry?
- What do these expressions of Poetry tell us about being human?
While we don’t know as much as we’d like about our ancient poets because so much has been lost, we do know that people across time and geography loved to tell stories and write down golden words. The ancients knew from the beginning that language was not just for tax bills or grain inventories, however important those might have been.
so much depends
William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,” considered one of the first examples of modern poetry.
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
We humans have always been able to see and to hear the difference… then and now… don’t you think?
It’s About Singing Not Rhyming
In school, you may have learned that poems have meter, stanzas, or even rhyming patterns. None of that is strictly true. Merriam-Webster says a poem “uses rhythm to create a lyrical effect.” But a lyrical effect refers to music, and the lyre or kithara (see letter M) often accompanied well, a poem. Such definitions take us in circles.
Still, this definition does emphasize that many of these poems were meant to be performed. Their rhyming schemes, if they had them, were memory aids. The earliest poets followed an oral tradition, of weaving their tales for audiences. Dactylic hexameter–if it was used by the poet and not the later copier or translator–helped the poet. Poets used rhymes, stock phrases, repeated motifs, and tropes to remember and to pad the story. Thus, Homer always spoke of “wrathful Achilles” and “wily Ulysses,” the “rosy-fingered dawn” and the “wine-dark sea” because otherwise how do you remember 15,693 lines of The Iliad?
Consider, too, that many of the first ancient language translators of the 19th century were steeped in the European romantic poetic tradition, replete with rules and rhyming schemes. Whether it was dactylic or hexameter is subject to interpretation. No matter what rhymed, though, these poems were songs. Poems are music without instruments, songs of life without the notes.
Gilgamesh, the Lord with the Very Black Beard
{I will sing the song of the lord with the very black beard, the man of battle. I will sing the song of …… athletic strength, the man of battle. …… the king, the man ……; my king ……, my lord …… garden ……. …… courtyard, …… ĝipar;} {(1 ms. has instead:) …… his mother who bore him spoke to the lord: “My king …… in the river, my lord …… your garden.”
Fragment from “Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven” University of Oxford version.
Gilgamesh, the warrior with the very black beard, is an unjust and petulant king, who loses a dear friend and wanders into foreign lands, searching for answers. He finally eases the pain of his heart when he returns and sees his home with new eyes. This is the classic hero’s journey, as we have heard it so often–Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Dorothy, Taran Assistant Pig-Keeper, Luke Skywalker–you name the hero.
Gilgamesh himself was a real person, a respected king from Uruk @2900 BCE. So respected that he earned his own fictional universe, like the tales of King Arthur or Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The stories of Gilgamesh were written by many people in several languages over centuries. Scholar Karen Emmerich points out that these circulated for nearly two thousand years among the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians, until cuneiform writing on clay tablets was replaced with a more efficient administrative writing system. Gilgamesh was lost with it. Those tablets were buried for another two thousand years until archaeologist and Assyriologists pulled them out of the mud and tried to put them back together. Like Gilgamesh, the tablets were lost and found.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, then, is not quite like other epics. Unlike The Iliad, Aeneid, or Beowulf, it’s a compilation of stories, fan fiction across a GCU: Gilgamesh Cuneiform Universe. Nobody stood in the firelight and told all of this together. Emmerich argues that this text was “less discovered than assigned,” especially considering that scholars still debate how to translate 2500 BCE Akkadian.
The first cuneiform tablet fragment was excavated with the Library of Ashurbanipal (letter “L”). British archaeologist Austen Layard was sifting through ancient documents, looking for corroboration with Biblical stories, some of which are historical and some let’s call it prophetic poetic license (Amos’s earthquake, historical; burning bush? maybe not). Layard was especially struck by the striking similarity between the Great Flood story in Gilgamesh and the Bible. A German professor, Friedrich Delitzsch, went on the lecture circuit claiming the Bible directly copied the flood from Gilgamesh, and received a blizzard of hate mail afterward. But there are several themes in Gilgamesh that end up in the Bible, as well as the Iliad and Odyssey. The discoveries breathed new life into the ancient stories, perhaps one reason why D. W. Griffith made a Babylon-themed movie in the early silent era.
As with all good stories, Gilgamesh includes great comedy:
The door…Enkidu raised his eyes,…and spoke to the door as if it were human:
From Gilgamesh Tablet VII, translated by Maureen Kovacs.
“You stupid wooden door, with no ability to understand… !
Already at 10 leagues I selected the wood for you, until I saw the towering Cedar … Your wood was without compare in my eyes. Seventy-two cubits was your height, 14 cubits your width, one cubit your thickness, your door post, pivot stone, and post cap … I fashioned you, and I carried you; to Nippur… Had I known, O door, that this would be your gratitude…, I would have taken an axe and chopped you up.”
Tales of Brave Ulysses
There is some humor in Homer’s epics, mostly funny insults or scenes where adulterous couples are caught by the cuckolded husband. Hilarity ensues. But most of Homer is adventure and strong emotion: Paris smitten by Helen, Achilles and Hector’s epic battle, Odysseus/Ulysses the trickster, who is forced to wander because of his tricks. One of the first papers I wrote in college was about Ulysses’ dog, Argos, one ear chewed off, lying on the manure pile. He immediately recognizes his master and feebly wags his tale, seeing Ulysses even though the master is in disguise and has been gone for years. I’m wiping a tear away just thinking of it.
Homer was a real person, probably a poet and blind, although so many stories were told about him that his legend is not unlike Gilgamesh–highly exaggerated. A few biographies were written centuries after he lived, but they are contradictory. Herodotus mentioned Homer, and while Herodotus made things up, his dating of Homer to @800 BCE is accepted. For comparison, the Trojan War is thought to have happened around 1200 BCE and the Classical Age of Greece (Plato, Aristophanes, etc) was 500 BCE.
Homer–whoever he was–was telling fantastic stories of events that happened centuries before him, and fantastic stories about Homer have been told ever since.
Unlike the writers of the Gilgamesh stories, Homer and his two epics have been studied since the Classical Age of Greece. The oldest complete text of The Iliad was written much later, in 1000 CE in Greek, with commentary in Latin. Fragments of his poems were later found, dated much earlier. None of those written versions, of course, were written by an actual guy named Homer. There is even an entire wing of study devoted to the “Homeric Question” i.e. was there even ever a guy named Homer? I recommend we treat this like the Shakespeare issue. Even if Shakespeare didn’t write all of his plays, we know there was a guy named Shakespeare who wrote some of them, so it’s easiest to think of them collectively.
Like the opening of Gilgamesh, the stock opening of the Odyssey, where the poet implores the gods for help in telling the story, still runs a shiver through me. It’s like the opening of a movie before the title sequence, as the music rises, and we see the place, the time, and the people about to begin their adventures:
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
Opening of “The Odyssey,” Robert Fitzgerald translation.
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.
The Tenth Muse
But not all ancient poetry was epics. Other cultures created poems of many different types. Egyptians enjoyed songs and music as much as the Sumerians. These included an entire category known as “Harper’s Songs,” which were poems etched on tombs. These reminded the mourners to enjoy life because it is transitory, and who else but a dead person ought to make such a poignant plea?
The most prolific individual poet in ancient history was Sappho of Lesbos. She was a real person, whose work was described extensively by her contemporaries and by those who came later. She was said to have written over 10,000 poems, which earned her the nickname “The Poetess,” as Homer was “The Poet.” They also called her the “Tenth Muse,” by her contemporaries and wrote poems and plays about her. Her image is painted on more plates and urns than Homer, by far.
Only 650 Sapphic poems have survived. A fortuitous archaeologist in the 1930s, searching through a trash heap in Oxyrhynchus in Egypt turned up dozens of ripped papyrus with Sapphic poems, which nearly doubled what had been found to date. It’s not clear why her poems didn’t survive when she had such a stellar reputation. Her subject was not battles but love and emotion, sometimes honor to the gods, often the frailty of humans. Some have suggested that either these subjects or simply that some of these are same sex caused the poems to be destroyed, but that has not been verified. Yet it might have led them to be recopied less often, and work has to be recopied across centuries in order to survive. As mentioned above, the best copy of the Iliad is from the Middle Ages, a time when they would not have been copying Greek women’s love poetry.
We only have a few of her works, snatches and thoughts of ideas. Yet even with only one completed poem and dozens “interpreted” from missing pieces, it’s clear Sappho why gained the ancient reputation that she had. A few words go a long way.
It is this that rouses a tumult
A section of Sappho’s poetry, curated by William Carlos Williams.
in my breast. At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
is broken.
Straightaway, a delicate fire runs
in my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
thunder.
The Other Contemporary Classic of Poetry
On the other side of the world from ancient Greece, there was also poetry, music, hymns to the gods, love, loss, devotion, and sorrow. The oldest existing collection of poetry from China is the Shijing, also called the Book of Songs, Book of Odes. Sometimes it is attributed to Confucius, who was the respected scholar and philosopher of the age. Do we not find it fascinating that Confucius, Plato, and Buddha lived roughly the same time?
The Shijing was structured, organized, and copied in a far more orderly fashion than the Mediterranean poems, although they are an anthology, like Gilgamesh. Unlike Gilgamesh, these are 300+ short poems. Themes of tradition, duty, and worship make them seem a little less adventurous than either Ulysses or Sappho, but they have the same “lyrical beauty” in placing such themes in nature.
As with the others, we have translations and copies, so it is hard to know how original these are. Even if they have survived as they were compiled in 700 BCE in China, even if they were compiled by Confucius himself, they are edited and orderly, polished and highly metered. Full of peach trees, lifting cranes, and hooting owls, they seem bland in comparison. And yet sometimes the notes are just as pure.
Here, for example, is a poem of man who feels neglected and lonely, not for loss of love in particular, but just apart from his brothers and family.
Consider the sun and the moon:
From Shijing Ode #26, “Odes of Bei.”
how did the latter exceed the former?
Now sorrow clings to my heart
like an unwashed dress.
Silently I consider my options,
but lack the wings to fly away.
If this voice hadn’t been so highly edited and forced to end the sentiment there, you could almost visualize him as Gilgamesh, saddened by circumstances, compelled to leave home and seek solace elsewhere in a grand aventure.
One Shijing example is illustrated, which somehow seems the best way to experience these. Instead of a plucked lyre string, we could see the artist with a brush, hear the gentle wash of the brush on paper.
These Chinese poems are a simple melody on strings–not too much. In that, they are as reminiscent as any bit pulled from Gilgamesh, the tales of Ulysses, the chambers of Sappho.
These poems are about what we all experience, and, often, only a little of that is needed, just that much and no more.