A Gloss on the following lines:
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine….
—“To Sleep” by John Keats
O soft embalmer of the still midnight
How peacefully we lie beneath your white
And gentle hands. You work your magic now,
We know, with soothing whispers and endow
With strength to take the approaching day’s delight
O soft embalmer of the still midnight.
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign
The eyes too full of beauty to decline
Your old companion, the maker of pleasant dreams
Who shows each thing much better than it seems
By glaring day. Soft hands, almost divine
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light.
Within a luscious garden of delight
We find ourselves enfolded in a pure
Fragrance of musky rose, a nightly cure
For heartaches we endure to stand upright.
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine,
Float inward. There our spirits find
A citadel secure from every foe
And we are made a part of the heavenly flow
That gently runs inside the heart sublime
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine.
First appeared in the 2018-2019 issue of Turning Home of the Poets Roundtable of Arkansas.
Dr. Emory D. Jones is a retired English teacher who taught in Cherokee Vocational High School in Cherokee, Alabama, for one year, Northeast Alabama State Junior College for four years, Snead State Junior College in Alabama for three years, and Northeast Mississippi Community College for thirty-five years. He has published poems in such journals as Voices International, The White Rock Review, Free Xpressions Magazine, The Storyteller, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Gravel, Pasques Petals, The Pink Chameleon, and Encore: Journal of the NFSPS. He is retired and lives in Iuka, Mississippi, with his wife, Glenda. He has two daughters and four grandchildren.
Sparks of Calliope 