"THE MUSIC OF SAPPHO IN THE POEMS OF ANGELA-MANALANG-GLORIA" by LYNN M. GROW

 The Music of Sappho in the Poems of Angela Manalang–Gloria

By Lynn M. Grow

 

            In his landmark edition of The Complete Poems of Sappho,¹  Willis Barnstone concludes his “Introduction” with "Sappho...as she sings in Greek she must sing in English.  The smallest of her surviving Greek fragments echoes with music” (XLV), and he begins the “Introduction” with “It cannot be said that her song has ever been surpassed.” (XIII)  Sappho seems to have foreseen this outcome.  In the Discourses 37.47 Dio Chryoston quotes Sappho's prediction that “'Someone, I tell you, will remember us.'” (Barnstone 177)  She is, as Barnstone says, “universally honored as the foremost lyric poet of Greek and Roman antiquity.” (XXI)  In fact, along with her contemporary Archilachos, she founded the era of Greek lyric poetry.  She was an innovator as well.  Two of her several firsts were the use of the pectis (a kind of harp) and the invention  of the Sapphic Stanza, a poetic mode taken up by Horace and Catullus.  But does her voice still resonate?  Yes.  As Barnstone has it, “the qualities of her verse,” which he enumerates at length, “compelled in antiquity as they do today.” (XXXIX)  And this in spite of the fact that, for various reasons, only a tiny fragment of her work is extant.  She wrote more than 500 poems, of which only two remain in their entirety.  None of her nine collections survived past the Middle Ages, leaving only about 2,000 lines of fragments and two complete poems.  Even these have required careful reconstruction to be presented as we see them today.  Sappho didn't title her poems.  Combined with the disintegration over time of the fragile papyri on which they were written, the Egyptian practice of cutting papyrus into strips to use as mummy wrap, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and the willful burning of her manuscripts by Christian zealots convinced that her poetry was a moral abomination, it is remarkable that we have what we have, and we still can't be entirely certain of line and stanza length and design.  

            It is, then, perhaps at least as remarkable that Sappho has sung to so many modern and contemporary poets, including Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Rainer Maria Rilke.  As this short list confirms, though she was the first woman poet in the western world, Sappho has been lauded by and has influenced both male and female poetry practitioners.  Among them are Sara Teasdale and Angela Manalang–Gloria.  In fact, it is likely that Manalang– Gloria heard the Sapphic voice filtered through Teasdale, whether or not she also heard it directly in Sappho's work.²  Teasdale was among the literary figures whose work was usually included in U.S. textbooks, which were adopted in the schools and universities in the Philippines when Manalang– Gloria was a student.³  It is more problematic whether Manalang–Gloria encountered Sappho directly via textbook, though she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Ph. B. in English from the University of the Philippines in 1929, and she was editor-in-chief of  The Philippine Collegian in her senior year. (Manalapaz 4)  However, it is possible that she could have read Sappho elsewhere, though almost certainly in translation.

            In any case, The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale [Toronto: Adansonia Press, 2018], contains six poems about Sappho,  three of which are quite lengthy.  Three of these poems, “Sappho” (20-22), “To Cleis” (41), and “Sappho” (78-82) are Sappho singing in propria sua. “Errina” represents Errina⁴ speaking directly to Sappho, and “To Errina” represents Sappho speaking directly to Errina.  “To Sappho” (12) is Teasdale speaking about Sappho in a style much like the lyric lilt of Manalang–Gloria:

 

                        Impassioned singer of the happy time.

                        When all the world was waking unto morn,

                        And dew still glistened on the tangled

                        thorn,

                        And Lingered on the branches of the lime

                        ____

                        Oh peerless singer of the golden rhyme,

                        Happy wert thou to live ere doubt was

                        born –

                        Before the joy of life was half out–worn,

                        And nymphs and satyrs vanished from

                        your clime.

                        Then maidens bearing parsley in their

                        hands

                        Wound thro' the groves to where the

                        goddess stands,

                        And mariners might sail for unknown

                        lands

                        Past sea–draped islands veiled in mystery[.]

 

The wispiness, archaisms (e.g., “wert thou”) and nearly overblown imagery are not disconsonant with the features of any number of poems of the early and mid–career Manalang–Gloria.⁵  Manalang–Gloria's poetic practices so resemble Teasdale's that her university mentor, Professor T. Inglis Moore, wrote of her that she was “our Sara Teasdale – sweet without being sickly, melodious, and charming.”  “Filipino Literature in English,” Philippine Magazine (January, 1932): 527.  It is also possible that Moore, educated at Oxford University, could have provided her with texts of Sappho's poems, central as the Greek and Roman classics were to Oxford's curriculum in the 1920's and 1930's.  If so, the edition was probably T. G. Tucker's Sappho (London and Melbourne: Lothian, 1914), which offered translations of all the then–known Sappho poems.

            Fortunately for literature, the moral opprobrium that has often swirled around Sappho and her poems on the grounds that she was a lesbian or an equal opportunity lover was largely absent in Sappho's own time and place;⁶  the same holds true for Teasdale.  In Sappho's case, the convenient myth, astonishingly present until the mid-20^th Century, was that Sappho's was “chaste love” (Barnstone XXXI–XXXII).  The public cover story for Teasdale's references to Sappho was that Teasdale was expressing mere artistic appreciation for a female poetry forerunner.  Therefore, her Sappho poems were harmless, classical, and inspiring to Teasdale, who was, after all, a “well brought up young woman.”  Even if she did connect to another woman physically, this was only a phase prior to marriage—and Teasdale was, like Sappho, married, though later Teasdale divorced.  This rationale is as much in the “If you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you—cheaply” category as the “chaste love” of Sapphos was.  Barnstone goes a bit far with “...whatever Sappho was in her life has very little to do with the content of her poetry....whether she was indeed bisexual...will not change the meaning of her poems.” (XXXIV)  What any author is or was in life can have nearly everything to do with the content of the literary works.  Would—or even could—Ralph Ellison have written Invisible Man (1952) if he hadn't been a Black American?  Would—or could—Linda Ty-Casper have written her early short stories microscopically detailing rural life in the Philippines three–fourths of a century ago had she not been a Filipina? Highly doubtful.

 A sufficiently gifted author could write equally high–quality literary works, but these works could not possibly encompass the same content. What Barnstone means, I think, is that the value of a literary work is largely unaffected by the content, and this rings true, so the onus belongs to the reader, who, to give any work its proper due, must set aside polemic and prejudice and be sensitive to the aesthetic achievement of an author.

            Manalang–Gloria's work, sadly, suffered from the chauvinism of male critics in the Commonwealth Period.  Four of the five judges in the 1940 Commonwealth Literary Contests found Manalang-Gloria's submission, Poems (the first poetry collection in English by a Filipina),  objectionable on moral grounds, in particular “Querida,” “Soledad,” “For Man Must War,” and, worst of all, “Revolt from Hymen.” Interestingly, the sole non-objector was the American Walter L. Robb (Man of Earth 390).

            From the perspective of more than 85 years later, it is difficult to understand why “For Man Must War” (95) got anyone's dander up.  Published on September 1^st, 1940, it contained no grainy language and no sexual allusion.  Its theme was a statement of the obvious: World War II had had already begun in both Asia and Europe.  Since 1937, China, with a far too small assist from the U.S., had been battling the Japanese invaders, and General Carlos Romulo's Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper articles about the questionable strength of the Philippines' defenses were fresh in mind.  The Nazis had seized large portions of continental Europe, and for a year the battle for Britain had been underway. The poem criticizes no one in particular and certainly no Filipinos or the Philippines as a whole  since the Philippines has never started a war—including the Philippine–American war, which actually was an armed invasion of a sovereign country, not an “insurrection.”  

            It is easier to understand why “Soledad” (73) was somewhat controversial.  This Shakespearean sonnet deals with a woman's one–night stand with a man to whom she was not married.  But she pays dearly for succumbing to passion—for one night only—with eternal damnation: “Her soul's cathedral burned by his desires.... And found her heaven in the depths of hell.” (73)⁷  “Querida” (121) ups the moral outrage ante, even though it is just a single quatrain.  Except for the title, it contains nothing objectionable; in fact, there are two striking, innocuous images: “a brilliant question mark of light...” and “in the brimming emptiness of night,” an interesting paradox.  As Sylvia Mendez Ventura observed in her 1992 book Ragtime in Kamuning: Sari–Sari Essays (Metro Manila: Anvil) 120: "Perhaps if she had called it 'Hospital,' nobody would have objected.”   In fact, had “Querida” been published in 1944 with the title “Clandestine Hukbalahap Meeting,” the poem would have elicited applause from everyone except, perhaps, the collaborators.

            “Revolt from Hymen” (144), however, is, as the Americanism goes, “a horse of a different color.”  It, like “Querida,” is short but succinct. Its four couplets, rhyming ababcdcd, might constitute the octave of a sonnet. Perhaps this well–controlled poetic structure is an ironic restrictive light cast upon the poem's theme: “One woman’s revolt against dominant male culture.”⁸   The hullabaloo over this poem stemmed from the horrified assumption that a married woman would want to permanently shirk her duty to her husband, but the poem does not assert that, much as a superficial perusal might give the impression that it does:

 

                        O to be free at last, to sleep at last

                        As infants sleep within the womb of rest.

 

                        To stir and stirring find no blackness vast

                        with passion weighted down upon the breast,

                        To turn the face this way and that and feel

                        No kisses festering on it like sores,

 

                        To be alone at last, broken the seal

                        That makes the flesh no better than a whore's.

 

All this needs to mean is that the narrator is not on call; were she, she would be no better than a call girl.  Even more drastic, as Eileen R. Tabios has noted in her Marsh Hawk Press article “Eileen R. Tabios: Poetic Influences: 'Angela Manalang-Gloria'” (downloaded October 26, 2025): “the poem protested marital rape.”  The poem does not suggest, even by implication, that the woman has forever shut her husband out.  It only is a call for the decency of sensitivity.  All of us, as men who have been married a long time, know—or at least should know—that the urge must be simultaneously mutual if is to lead to happiness and harmony rather than corrosive dissent and dissatisfaction.

            In Manalang–Gloria's case, her three children and her grief when her husband Celedonio was killed by a Japanese patrol in 1945 attest to her undiminished love for the man she married in 1929.  That comes across clearly in the 1940 poem “To the Man I Married” (101).  The octave reads:

 

                        You are my earth and all that earth implies:

                        The gravity that ballasts me in space,

                        The air I breathe, the land that stills my cries

                        For food and shelter against devouring days.

                        You are the earth whose orbit marks my way

                        And sets my north and south, my east and west,

                        You are the final, elemental clay

                        The driven heart must turn to for its rest.

 

The death of her husband, I think, primarily accounts for the fact that from war's end to 1950, Manalang–Gloria, grief-stricken, published only three more poems, two of which (“Poem,” 1946, and “Dawning,” 1947) were dedicated to Celedonio.  The former has the emotional intensity, underlying but strong, of Archibald MacLeish's 1926 poem “Memorial Rain,” dedicated to MacLeish's brother, who had been killed in World War I.  Manalang– Gloria's last poem was “Old Maid Walking on a City Street,” another single quatrain poem with a tensile strength that is nearly aphoristic:

 

                        She had a way of walking through concupiscence

                        And past the graces her fingers never twirled:

                        Because her mind refused the heavy burden,

                        Her broad feet shoveled up the world. (153)

 

This in and of itself is a powerful refutation of the half–baked idea that “Revolt from Hymen” reflects a personal conviction of Manalang–Gloria  that marital lovemaking was a burdensome duty from which a woman would seek permanent relief. Along the same dunce cap lines, the obtuse editors in the Bureau of Education insisted that she change “whore's” in “Revolt from Hymen” to “golden bores” (Manalang 15) for the student edition of Poems.  The substitution makes no sense whatever, but at least the poem could be reissued otherwise intact, which is more than four of the judges in the 1940 Commonwealth Literary Contest would settle for.

            The pathetic critical denigrations of Manalang's poetry in the pre-war years only demonstrate the sadly deficient state of literary criticism in that era.  Manlapaz cites a paragraph from a justly respected prose fictionist, Arturo R. Rotor,⁹published in The Literary Apprentice in 1936.  In it, lines one through four are self–refuted by lines five through eight. The rest of the paragraph implodes on its own.

            Jose Garcia Villa was the only Philippine literary critic of his time with both trustworthy taste and trustworthy acumen.  Unfortunately, he saw himself as a rival, not a colleague, of Manalang–Gloria.  As Manlapaz (1) reminds us, he laid into her in “The Status of Philippine Poetry,” Graphic June 6, 1935: 6: “Let me now blast the theory that she is a first–rate poet.  At her best, she is a third-rater, a writer of merely pretty poetry, pleasant, amateur verses.” This, however, is vitriol, no doubt initially stemming from being passed over as literary editor of the Collegian in favor of  Manalang– Gloria (Manlapaz 4).  Unfortunately, Villa could not envision himself and Manalang–Gloria in the same cooperative, collegial way that the male poet Arcaeus and the female poet Sappho took one another.  Their poetic signatures were so similar that, in several cases, a poem first attributed to one of them has since been reclassified as actually written by the other, yet they honored and respected one another.  On the other hand, the poems of Villa and those of Manalang–Gloria are so distinctively different that no one would ever mistake the work of one for the work of the other.  That being the case, the worst that would be thought of their literary interactions, one would surmise, would be “You work your side of the street, and I'll work mine,” but for Villa that wasn't the case.  Manalapaz is inclined to give Villa something of a free pass with the hypothesis that his antipathy was “...mainly because she did not share his fascination with modernism, or at least his version of it” (15-16), but it is hard to reconcile his nearly ad hominem attacks with this rationale. In his Graphicarticle, Villa went on to lambast Manalang–Gloria with “...she has no energy, her works are significantly inconsequential...back of it all there is nothing, no passion, no drive, only a feeble nostalgia.  She is Miss Nostalgia.”  Villa's claim that she had no energy or, especially, passion, seems to have been shared by no one else, in 1935, when Villa published his article, or since then.  Manlapaz is exceedingly generous when she hypothesizes that Villa would have—or even might have—revised his assessment had he read Manalang–Gloria's 1940 collection Poems (16), but this idea is a stretch.  Jealousy needs no factual basis, and rarely do the facts moderate jealousy.  Also, the gratuitous pseudo–title “Miss Nostalgia” raises the ugly specter of male chauvinism.  Even if Villa had later realized that at best his denigration of  Manalang-Gloria's work was premature, his concession that “if Trinidad Tarrrosa Subido had one candle power,  Manalang lighted a thousand”¹⁰  was only attributed to him by Arcelliana as a private remark “cited in Abad” in Arcelliana's “Forty Years of Solitude: Five Early Filipino Poets in English.” Jose (October 1982: 66 (Manlapaz 16, 20). Even if we can trust a second-hand remark made orally more than 40 years earlier, it was only a private conversation, not what it should have been: a public, published recantation or at least a revaluation based on “the improvement” Manalang–Gloria had made since 1935.

            In reality, though, at least three poems, “Soledad” (published March 6^th, 1935), “Apology” (published March 7th, 1935) and “complaint to the Muses” (published April 30th, 1935) were in print prior to the release of Villa's article, and all three had dispensed with wistfulness, melancholy, overly delicate, gossamer–like fragility, and the other stereotypical Romantic Era conventions.¹¹  To extend Villa an olive branch, it is true that these three changing-the-current poems were not easily accessible, since not yet published in book form,  and the Edna Z Manlapaz and Gemino H. Abad Index to Philippine Poetry in English would not appear until 1988.  Another branch from the olive tree is that I wholeheartedly agree with Eileen R. Tabios' endorsement of Villa in the title note (289) of her 2021 novel DoveLion (New York:  A C Books): “honoring the Philippines' most important 20^th century English language poet.”  My reasons for concurring overall with Tabios' valuation, in spite of Villa's flaws, are presented in my article “Jose Garcia Villa: The Poetry of Calibration.” World Literature  Written in English 27.2 (Autumn, 1987): 326-344. Rptd in L. M. Grow, World Enough and Time: Epistemologies and Ontologies in Modern Philippine Poetry. Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 2000: 40-62.

            A factor in the Sapphic music in Manalang-Gloria's poems is the underlying harmonies created by, among other elements, “ ...submission to the firm discipline of strictly measured cadence”  in keeping with what Teasdale “called 'song': a musical poetry based on directness, simplicity, and emotional intensity for which the main model was Sappho.”¹²  “Simplicity, however, does not mean “simplistic” or “sparse.”

            The musical note that is conspicuously absent from Sappho is the first sounded in The Complete Poems of Angela Manalang–Gloria, in the sportive and playful “Angelita” (25-26).  The speaker is a would–be lover¹³  who would like to kiss Angelita, but she coyly keeps her distance.  The interaction between the speaker and Angelita is innocent flirtation, as the speaker's references to Angelita confirm: “You sly witch,” “You fair imp,” and “your elfinish grace.”  Another poem, cute—in this case to the threshold of the precious—is “May” (110):

 

                        April came as April went

                                    Through a magic crystal weather.

                        Now with mischievous intent

                                    Pan and I will walk together,

 

                        Lean and hold our breath and say

                                    Softly from a jasmine bower,

                        “We have caught the fairy May:

                                    Can't you see her in this flower?”

 

Finally, we get the five–quatrain “Poems” (82). published August 31^st, 1935, a coy, delightful inventory of  Manalang–Gloria's poetic productions:

 

                        There are so many poems in my head

                                    all wanting to be seen,

                        And some are bright in silver lace,

                                    And some are plumed with green.

                        The gay and lovely ones pirouette

                                    Like dancers in my mind,

                        And others, frail and wistful nuns,

                                    Tread somberly behind.

 

                        The madcap inspirations, bent

                                    On flinging stars about,

                        Contrive to break away before

                                    I know they are out.

 

                        While the ambitious fancies, dressed

                                    In proud, immortal white,

                        Look upwards all the time – and so

                                    They never come out right.

 

                        But all of them, however perfect

                                    In my mind's retreat,

                        Appear bewildered when released,

                                    And oh, so incomplete.

 

The personification here is carried along on a smooth and consistent but insistent current of rhythm.

            The playfulness of “Angelita,” “May,” and “Poems” is what has saved them from the traits that triggered the disapproval of many of Manalang- Gloria's critics besides Villa.  One of these traits is the density of the imagery, leaving aside as irrelevant the classification of many of the images as “Romantic clichės and claptrap.”  An image need not fade with time or frequency of use by other authors (e.g., The Homeric epithet “wine–dark sea”).  The problem is that, in a substantial number of her early poems,  Manalang–Gloria lays images on with a trowel, not an artist's brush, and she seems to have gravitated along the fault line that anything worth doing is worth overdoing.  Stanza two of  “Arabesque Dream” (30-33), especially because of its considerable length, is a convincing example of an early (June 6^th , 1926) poem with both flaws.  Stanza two alone goes

 

                        … my words are as dead leaves

                        You carelessly trample through.

                        Hear me.

                        My world is a floral sphere

                        Of moonbleached cobwebs

                        And dew–kissed camias,

                        Born on the wings of a gentle zephyr.

                        Your world is a whirling sphere

                        Of painted masks in a tipsy pattern,

                        And metallic whispers and velvet swishes

                        Of revolving figurines

                        Within a revolving sphere.

                        And when the shadow of this world of yours

                        Falls upon mine –

                        Mine vanishes in shreds of sunset mist.

 

Even if we amend “Born” to “Borne” in line seven to correct what looks to be a typographical error, this passage eludes explication.  Its meaning is what “Vanishes in shreds of sunset mist.”

            Other elements to many of these early poems that distance the poem from the reader are the speaker's stances of melancholy, nostalgia, mistiness, vagueness, and indirection.  “Starlight Fantasy” (28-29). published May 1^st  , 1926, showcases these distancing features: “The shimmer of the hovering dusk, / “wafts back the echo alone (lines 3-4); “nightand gloom together fall, / “night on the dark, deserted terrace, / “Gloom on my dazed, bewildered being, As I grope – / “Groping in vain – “ (lines 7-11); “Lost forever,” (line 13); “Nevermore to return! / Nevermore to whisper / the ave of  incarnate day; / “Nevermore to fathom” (lines 14-17); “Only a phantom remains –” (line 19) [my emphasis throughout].  These elements of “Starlight Fantasy” —and other similarly–constructed poems—partition the reader away from the poem.

            In striking contrast, the most riveting aspect of Sappho's work is its haeccity, a “thisness” that positions the reader face–to–face with Sappho herself.  As Barnstone confirms, “Her words, used masterfully, make the reader one with the poet, to share her vision of herself.  There is no veil between poet and reader.” (XXXVIII)  I am not inclined to go quite as far as Barnstone when he asserts that Sappho's “...emerging portrait is as precise and profound as a Vermeer or  a Goya” (XVII), but his likening of portraiture to verbal description does direct attention to the presence of color in Sappho's poems.  The colors are all bright, as in “O gold–crowned Aphrodite”¹⁴  in “To Aphrodite” (11); “Earth is embroidered / with rainbow–colored garlands” in “Earth” (18); “a purple ribbon” in “Hair Yellower than Torch Flame” (15); and “Like a sweet apple reddening on a high branch”  in “The Virgin.” (18)  The bright colors combine with the throughgoing tactility of the imagery, to anchor the poems in the empirical.  Absent are imaginative entities or flights of fancy.  There are patches of color in Manalang–Gloria's poems too, like “The ruby stones rolled in and out of the spiraled gold, / And dotted in purple my arabesque dream,” (132) the last four lines of Part II of “Arabesque Dream,” but the setting for these “ruby stones rolled in and out of spiraled gold” is not a physical object, like a ring, but instead accompaniments to the purple dots of a dream.

            However, for  Manalang–Gloria, the poetry tide had started to turn as early as December 4^th, 1927, when she published “The Call of the Ocean” (46).  Its five unrhymed, irregularly–sized stanzas are free of artificiality and contrived imagery.  Instead, we get straightforward narration.  The poem opens “The voice of the city is as nothing / when I hear the ocean calling, whis- / pering in my ear as it whispered / on the beach of Legaspi.”  The third stanza opens “The ocean's billows sing to me,” and the concluding stanza is:

 

                        And the breakers sing to me of more:

                        They sing of an unfathomable eternity,

                        for when I look before me and the vast

                        example of sun–flecked blue meets my

                        eyes, I question its immensity, and

                        the ocean, answering, chants its eter –

                        nal anthem.

 

Is this a distinguished poem? No.  It is bland at best.  But what is not in it is far more significant than what is: no artificiality or contrivance; no wistful, nostalgic melancholy; and no traffic jam of tinkling, gossamer imagery.  We don't have John Keats' nightingale that “Singest of summer in full–throated ease”—yet—but we start to anticipate the onset of yet more Sapphic song.

 

            In the ensuing eight years,    Manalang–Gloria permanently shed the over–wrought imagery, the melancholy, the nostalgia, and vagueness of direction and inconsequentiality of theme that had dogged her work earlier.  On October 23^rd, 1935, she published “To a Lovely Woman.”  As Manlapaz noted (8), Manalang–Gloria, like Teasdale, benefitted by using compact metrical forms (in this case the Shakespearean Sonnet) to contain the material.  The octave poses the narrator's question about whether the woman should be a “rainbowed shower”, “The very arc of a dream.” etc.  In the sestet the narrator says no to these traditional, stereotyped romantic ploys and instead identifies the woman as “the undefined / Reality of all unreal things” (lines 11-12), this injecting a substantive intellectual definition to supplant the worn–out traditional approaches.

            “Cementerio del Norte” (86) is a first–ranking poem that was first published on October 28^th, 1936.  If the lines were rearranged by adding each inset line to its preceding line, we would get two rhymed quatrains (abab and cbcb), alternately exact rhyme and slant rhyme.  As is, it flows beautifully, as fluent as Sappho's “Afroditi of the Flowers at Knossos” (Barnstone 5) does :¹⁵

 

                        And so, it all must come down to this – a dying

                                    afternoon,

                        Thin cerements of rain around the forlorn

                                    ghost of weeping,

                        White tombs so desolately splendid, a priestly

                                    monotone

                        Drifting in sacramental grace, and then –

                                    the final sleeping.

                        What else is there to say? (The last word has been

                                    said too soon

                        For you and all the golden hopes once minted

                                    for your keeping)

                        White tombs so desolately splendid, bone unto

                                    alien bone,

                        What else is there to say, now that the sleepless

                                    dead are sleeping?

 

The intricacies here include the appropriate delicacy of tone, whose quiet intensity is as it is in “Poem” (151), and the resemblance to “Memorial Rain” is even more pronounced.  The “dying afternoon” has two meanings: that it is late in the afternoon and that it is an afternoon to commemorate Those who have died.  Both meanings apply.  “Thin cerements of rain around  the forlorn / ghost of weeping” merges the meaning of “cerements” as traditional waxed cloth wrapping for corpses (today any grave clothes) and the pathetic fallacy of the heavens weeping for the dearly departed.  In stanza two, line one  (“the last word”) means both Last Rites administered by the priest and the last utterances the honored dead had spoken.  The near oxymoron “Tombs so desolately splendid” conveys the reality that, however magnificent it may be, a tomb is desolate because it is a tomb.  The next apparent oxymoron “The sleepless / dead are sleeping” must be taken to mean that now the soul, as well as the body, is at rest because of  “a priestly / monotone / Drifting in sacramental grace...” (stanza one). 

            “To an Idolater” (90), published June 16^th, 1937, is an innovative, fetching Shakespearean sonnet:

                        I knelt inside the temple of the Lord

                                    Today, to shrive me of my fallen ways,

                        But when I caught your look on me and heard

                                    The muted salve on your adoring face,

                        I could not pray, for all my need to pray,

                                    For all my sins that dragged me down the aisle:

                        You gaze at me.  That was enough.  Today

                                    I was God for one immortal while.

 

 

                        Praise be to you, O eyes that worship mine

                                    In dream libations at my altar poured!

                        In you I, who am human, turn divine:

                                    I who am sin, become the living word!

 

                        Praise be to you, O eyes that can see

                        This Magdalen that breathes the breath of me!

 

On one hand, this is a return to the playful poems written earlier in Manalang–Gloria's career.  A comic element is present in the “I...heard / The muted salve [Latin for “Hail”] on your adoring face.”  She couldn't have heard a muted sound, and it is in the mouth, not on the face, that the “sound” is to be found.  In stanza two the oxymoron “immortal while” is obviously hyperbolic.  In the poem's last line, “Magdalen” of course refers to the centuries–old tradition that Mary Magdalen was a reformed prostitute.  The tradition was based on a conflation of three different women, one being the “sinful woman” of Luke: 7: 37-50 in the Christian Bible.  The Catholic Church in 1969 corrected that conflation error, but of course the tradition was still accepted in 1937. On the other hand, the poem can also be read as a cynical commentary on how easily people can succumb to sin.

            “This Will Be Remembered” (92), two rhymed quatrains published December 31^st, 1937, is like its compatriot on page 93, “The Moral Is,” published April 14^th, 1938, a good but not great poem, but both of these two– quatrain pieces show that Manalang–Gloria the poet has hit her full stride.  Both are unimpeded in rhythmic flow and each has an undercurrent of meaning that the swift pace and unassuming vocabulary level tend to gloss over.  In the former, the theme seems to be that though love has been abandoned, it will “endure forever” in memory, just as abandoned cities, “crumbling in the sun,” will.  A moment's thought, however, is sufficient to disqualify this rationalization.  First, love doesn’t last past the moment it's discarded; the memory of it is not the same as “it” is. Second, “endure forever”?  Impossible.  No one is immortal.  When both lovers pass into the great beyond, both the love and the memory of that particular love do the same.  Even the comparison to ancient ruined cities ends up on the shoals.  Ancient Troy was lost for centuries, only being rediscovered by famed archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1870.  The poem's example of Babylon flounders, at least in part, as well.  The city never disappeared; it was only lost from memory, but its storied “Hanging Gardens” (one of the seven wonders of the ancient world) did, and if they existed at all, we still haven't come across them.  So even if  “memory” is assumed to include preserved records of these places, like Homer's mention of Troy, there is no way to judge whether those ancient accounts are mythological or historical.

                        “The Moral Is” seems to be a rationale for warming both hands at the fire of life.  Stanza two reads:

 

                        Who, between sin and whitened virtue,

                                    Choose to play the Jezebel,

                        Knowing that heaven is twice heaven

                                    Only to those who once knew hell.

 

Is this “the moral” or “the inmoral”?   Either way, with “To An Adolater” and “This will Be Remembered,” “The Moral Is” reveals yet another impressive side to  Manalang–Gloria's achievement: embedding fundamental value questions in the texture of short poems worded in ordinary language.  Doing so is in the tradition of William Blake's poems and engravings in  The Songs of Innocence (1789) and Experience (1794) and, more recently and directly, Edna St. Vincent Millay, particularly in poems like “Afternoon on a Hill” (1917) and “Recuerdo” (1922).  Although now Millay's reputation is muted considerably, as Manlapaz notes (7), “At the time [of Angela Manalang's university stay] the women poets most admired were Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Sara Teasdale.”  It is highly probable, therefore, that Manalang–Gloria read at least some Millay poems.

            1940 was a chronological tipping point for Manalang–Gloria's  poetry. On one hand, she ventured into the Proletarian realm for which her temperament and proclivity were unsuited.  The result was a thankfully small  clutch of prosy, undistinguished productions: “To the Great Proletariat” (118), “The Outcast” (119), and “Pier Seven” (120).  On the other hand,  Manalang–Gloria also penned such excellent pieces as “Ten Years After” (102), which is impeccable in terms of both its breadth and its depth.  It opens and closes with a coy disclaimer:  “So many moons have come and gone / I have forgotten quite” (stanza one) and “So many moons, so many moons / Have ridden on the tide, / My heart in scant remembrance keeps / The sacrificial bride...” (stanza six).  The narrator then proves that she not only recalls her bridal night, but relives it in all its surging power: “The ancient, terrifying splendor / That burned my bridal night – / Thunder of Archeus through the dark / Delirium of desire: / The crash of senses star – betrayed / And orbited in fire:” (lines 3-8).  Probably all that saved “Ten Years After” from the outrage of the prudes who condemned “Querida,” “Revolt from Hymen,” and “Soledad” is that the narrator is married.  In that case, it is only proper and expected that the woman is engulfed in a “Delirium of Desire,” but unmarried she should feel no such thing.  Right.  But if the sexual power surge didn't arouse opposition, why didn't the “Thunder of Archeus”?  This phrase denotes the Paracelsian alchemical concept of a violent, powerful action of a vital force that directs the growth of living beings, not a mainstream Christian belief. ¹⁶   Probably because they didn't understand it, any more than they did  “a stark omnipotence /godded my earth and sky” (lines 15-16), which is, even though metaphorical here, to evoke the Pantheism latent in the pronouncement of Thales of  Miletus that “all things are full of the gods.”  Although line 11 alludes toRevelation 21.6 in the Christian Bible – “I am Beginning … I am End...” –  stanza five is so expansive that we wonder whether the narrator has conflated herself with the “I” of line 11:

 

                        And wider far than genesis

                        The onliness that grew

                        Beyond all height, beyond all breadth,

                        Beyond the primal two...

 

The “genesis” of the stanza's opening line is sandwiched between the Revelation allusion and the line 20 allusion to Adam and Eve (“The primal two”), which may well make us wonder whether it is also Genesis, the first book of the Christian Bible.  We also wonder whether “The onliness” of line 18 is only a hyperbolic statement of how special is the love of the narrator and her husband. “Onliness” does meam the state of being unique, the only one of a kind, but here does it also mean that the love, having grown “Beyond all height, beyond all breadth” is now coterminous with the Creation itself?  If so, it would, from the conservative Christian perspective at least, be excoriated as blasphemous hubris.  Regardless “Ten Years After” is    Manalang–Gloria at the height of her powers.

            The next several poems are memorable in parts, rather than wholes.  “Change” (103) flies in the face of the Romantic stance that, as Buddy Holly put it, “Love is love not fade away” in the song  “Not Fade Away” (1957).  On the contrary, the narrator firmly asserts “I shall outgrow this love of you.” (line nine).  Why? Because “Bereft of change.../I would not love you now.  I would be dead.” (lines 13-14)  The narrator, far from bemoaning mutability, relishes it, as the pyrotechnical rejoiner to “ tut tut” prudes makes abundantly clear: “The books I ravished by the censored score; / Music that like delerium burned my days;  The golden calf I fashioned to adore” (lines 5-7).  The “golden calf” Exodus allusion in line seven is especially provocative.

                        At first the next poem, “Words” (104), might seem to be an apologetic retraction of the thesis of “Change”: “I never meant the words I said, / And never mean the words I write” (lines 1-2), but the poem's concluding two lines express the more profound stance: “Unfathomed depths withhold the wonder / Of all the words I never say.”  The depths don't hold  the wonder; they withhold it. The depths don't withhold the words; the narrator apparently could say the words.  What is inexpressible is the wonder of these words, which is why the narrator enjoins her unintroduced listener to “trouble not your honest head / But come and kiss me now goodnight.” (lines 3-4)  These depths can't be fathomed by explication.  They are accessible only by what the Greek term empathos entails in modern usage.  Sappho unquestionablywould thought primarily in terms of the related term empatheia, often used to denote physical affection or passion, but the  Manalang–Gloria conception in the poem is of an entity solely internal.

            Unlikely as it might seem, “Aprilwise” (105) is so far afield from anything else in the Manalang-Gloria corpus  that it might be taken as some- thing an intruding wag had slipped in. “Yea, there be many / Ways of drinking deep of April” – the first two lines – sound like an amalgamation of a Jonathan Edwards sermon, the opening of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (ca. 1387-1400), and a previously unknown Dylan Thomas discard from a poem like “Especially When the October Wind” (1934).  The personifications in “Aprilwise” are certainly innovative (e.g., “The ways of mossy wisdom anciently / Sitting on a banyan tree” (lines 5-6) but defy precise explication.  What is “mossy wisdom”?  How can wisdom, mossy or not, sit anciently?  In lines 15-16, how can “Vagrant lips,” whatever those are, remember anything, much less “the strangest height”?  In the case of “Aprilwise,” we may have to pull the ripcord and fall back on the questionable idea that “A poem should not mean, but be,” and do the same for the six unbounded rhyming quatrains of “Song of Awakening” (108).  It would no doubt be better if “Because” (106) did neither mean nor be, but we do return to the high ground of Manalang-Gloria's offerings in “Heloise to Abelard” (107).  The well–known true story of their tragic love is in the background here.  After Peter Abelard was hired to be Heloise's tutor, he became her mentor in the ancient Greek sense of that term; Sappho would have approved.  They married secretly, had a child, and then Heloise's uncle arranged for thugs to waylay and castrate Abelard.  Heloise became a nun and Abelard a monk, but they wrote letters back and forth to one another and they were buried together.  The Shakespearean sonnet “Heloise to Abelard” can be envisioned as a letter Heloise wrote to Abelard, expressing the undying strength of her love and her defiant refusal to deny that love or to regret it, a fenale stance parallel to that of the male Byronic hero.  This poem ranks with “Ten Years After” and “Cementerio del Norte” as top–echelon Manalang–Gloria. It has the pyrotechnics of “Soledad,” and it merits citation in full:

 

                        That I have loved you is beyond denial.

                        That I have sinned is not so plain:

                        Call me, O joy, and though your voice were phial

                        of hemlock,¹⁷ I would drink of it again.

 

                        There is no god¹⁸  to make me now surrender

                        What startling height of folly we have known,

                        What new Gomorrha¹⁹  builded on this wonder

                        Of hellfire surging through our veins alone.

 

                        O heady rapture of desire forbidden,

                        Forbidden lips forever haunting mine!

                        If to my hunger you are fruit from Eden,

                        If to my thirst you are nepenthean²⁰  wine,

                        If this is sin, then never will I be shriven

                        Who, drunk with hell, now dare the curse of heaven!

 

This poem's tensile strength does not preclude melodic mellifluousness. In fact, the combination of these qualities enables its excellence.

                        In the next few poems we get felicities parceled out parsimoniously: “The flock of words I tended...” (“Until you came,” p. 109); “... with mischievous intent / Pan and I will walk together”²² (“May,” p. 110”); “Vibrant with light like you and me / Who conjugate infinity!” (“In Defense of Poets,” p. 128).     

                         “For One Who Slept and Died” (141), however, is striking in its brief, short–line two-quatrain entirety:

                        Rather than close

                                    my eyes in this

                        Fatal repose

                                    of chloral bliss,

                        I rose uncherished

                                    And fugitive

                        From you, who perished:

                                    And lo, I live!

 

This is yet another new direction for Manalang–Gloria: an almost macabre exultation of someone who has survived in contradistinction to one who has not.  The first person narrator sees herself  “uncherished,” as a “fugitive.”  The “Fatal repose / Of chloral bliss” refers to a chemical compound, trichloroloroacetalidehyde (C₂ HCI₃) that reacts with water to produce chloral hydrate ( C₂ H₃ Cl₃ O₂).  It has been useful as a sedative to treat severe, short-  term insomnia, but used habitually it can lead to addiction, which is why safer alternatives are usually prescribed.  “Chloral bliss” is thus ironic and straightforward at the same time.  The narrator could escape the “you” by dying in sleep, but, because “you” has died (cause of death unspecified), the narrator has escaped anyway.  Either way, the narrator achieves “bliss,” about as cynical and anti-Romantic a stance as can be imagined.   

            “Pronounce the Word” (145) is another poem with a recriminatory outlook about the death of love: “free my captive days from Babylon, / Or you will find their skeletons forever / Doomed and forever branded as your own” (lines 10-12).  “Babylon” is the key allusion here.  Its symbolism runs the gamut from the nadir of unjust, oppressive, and decadent to the apex of civilization.  The combination of the formal but archaic syntax (e.g., “be no tearful lover”) and the sermon–like “Pronounce the word” that opens the poem and is repeated as the opening sentence of line five generates the feeling of judicial instruction to the wayward lover, a chastisement for being “the rover” (line nine).  It might be fanciful to think of “Pronounce the Word” as an emblem poem, but doing so would account for the layout: six couplets, rhymed ab, could as well be grouped into three quatrains.  The visual result of the six couplets resembles the sparseness of a skeleton.  Is this skeleton one of the “...skeletons forever / Doomed and forever branded as your own!”  (lines 11-12)?  The workmanship alone of this poem is impressive, in keeping with the overall layout design of the 1940–published poems.  Appropriately, the last of these is “End” (147), which itself ends “The bright song ended, / The chapter closed.” (lines 11-12) The Complete Poems is a volume of “bright songs,” in which the voice of Sappho is modulated by the chorus provided by Sara Teasdale, Emily Dickinson, and perhaps to a lesser extent, by Amy Lowell and Edna St. Vincent Millay as well.

            The end of The Complete Poems is also the end of Manalang–Gloria's poetry–publishing career: a single quatrain entitled “Old Maid Walking on a City Street” (153).  It shows that, as a 43-year-old, she had lost nothing of her poetic acuity.  Tito Genova Valiente, in his Field Notes column “Remembering the Pioneers: Angela Manalang–Gloria & Bienvenido Santos” in the May 6, 2020 Bicol Mail, is so enthralled that he likens Mount Mayon to the old woman: “the tip of the crater perfect at near sunset, was... like an old maid, an ancient beautiful woman, unapologetic, at dusk, of her concupiscence.” (n.p.) Although Valiente's enthusiasm endows the old maid with beauty (which Manalang–Gloria's poem doesn't) and he characterizes the old maid's concupiscense as “at dusk,” when the poem's sense is that concupiscence was entirely rejected by the old maid, his applause for the poem is quite appropriate.  It is a final salvo fired at the prudes, in effect asking “Is this what you want, no graces and tnstead 'broad feet' that can only 'shovel up the world'”?

            In the late 19^th  Century, Austrian philosopher and renowned classicist Theodor Gomperz proffered the suggestion that the bright sunlight and sharp, distinct sightlines of Greece contributed to the clarity of thought of the pre–Socratic philosophers, whereas “dreamy,” “misty” environments conduced to abstract indistinctness.²²   As charming as this idea is, it proved unsustainable in the 20^th Century, and, for that matter has had no significant traction in the visual arts either. For instance, Greek painter Michalis Oikonomou is known for dreamy, even sometimes misty atmospheric landscapes (Cf, Maison ou bord de la mer, ca. 1927).  One of the Philippines' most celebrated painters, Juan Luna, is known for no such style, as his unforgettable Figura Feminina (1898) so clearly shows.  Even the contemporary Bicol artist Pancho Piano has created local landscapes that are a “kaleidoscope of color”  with nothing misty or surreal in spite of Piano's abstract expressionist style.

            But what about poetry?  Truly, Sappho's poems brim with bright, direct sunshine.  For her, as we see in the one–sentence fragment  “Earth” (Barnstone 18), “Earth is embroidered / with rainbow–colored garlands” in daytime; at night, “Stars around the beautiful moon / conceal their luminous form / when in her fullness she shines / on the earth / in silver” (“Moon,” Barnstone 18).  Sappho is just as at ease with the deities she worships as she is with the physical universe, as her invocations and supplications to the gods most constantly present to her, Aphrodite and Hera, confirm.  She is beset by no fear or anxiety; she invites them, even implores them to come, as the first two lines of “To Lady Hera” (Barnstone 17) show: “Be near me Lady Hera while I pray / for your graceful form to appear.”  In “Afroditi of the Flowers at Knossos” (Barnstone 5), Sappho's supplication goes so far as to ask the goddess to be the sommelier: “Afroditi, take the nectar / and delicately pour it into gold / wine cups...” (lines 12-13).

            Manalang–Gloria's cosmos is not often suffused with sunlight. Her early career landscapes are mysterious, fairy–like, even mystic.  Her poetry expresses anxiety bordering on angst, and she had to endure traumatizing events in her life, such as the tuberculosis from which she suffered and the killing of her husband.  She became reclusive, retreating to her abaca farm in Albay.  So, we might wonder, what has Sappho, ever gregarious and seemingly unflustered even by the two exiles she and her family had to endure, in common with Manalang–Gloria?  The answer lies not in their lives, but in their poetry.  The poetic oeuvre of each is infused, if not suffused, with reverence.  Sappho's reverence did not derive from the landscape, picturesque though it was.  As Barnstone (XVIII) asserts, it differs from the predominant rockiness of much of Greece by having “salt flats, dry hills then wooded....It was known in ancient times for its grains, fruit trees, and, above all, the large valleys of olive groves.”  Barnstone goes on to assert that “there is no better way to know the images of Sappho's poetry than to see today the light, sea, and land of Mytilini...”  In contrast, the landscape of Bicol,  Manalang–Gloria's home region, is one of volcano peaks often shrouded in clouds and mist, and the combination of lush greenness, volcanic cones, and sorrounding waters often imparts a dream-like, surreal quality to it, and this Manalang–Gloria revered.

            If Sappho indeed had a thiasos (an informal school) for young women to prepare them for marriage to aristocratic husbands—and tradition has it that she did—Sappho would have taught the fine arts: painting, music, poetry, even the art of polite conversation,  But she would also have taught the art of husband–gratifying love, part and parcel of ritualized worship of Aphrodite and Hera (the goddess of marriage, women, childbirth, and family).

              Manalang–Gloria's “Revolt of the Hymen” might seem at first to be a rejection of Sappho's worldview, granted that Hymen was the ancient Greek god of marriage ceremonies, feasts, and song.  In fact, originally “hymen” was the marriage song itself.  He was associated with Aphrodite, but also with Eros, who in turn was strongly associated with the male perspective on marriage.  In the poem that aroused such a commotion, Manalang–Gloria's “Revolt,” was directed against the “on call” availability of the female to attend to the male's importunings, not against love–making within the marriage.  Therefore, there is really no disconsonance in the das weltbild of these two great poets.  They could comfortably and amicably sit together in Mytilini on a sun–splashed temple step overlooking the wine–dark, or sapphire blue, Aegean Sea and quaff from gold cups the Pramnian dark red wine of 7^th Century B.C. Mytilini—strong, fragrant, and highly prized—as Sappho and  Manalang–Gloria are—delicately poured by Aphrodite of the Flowers at Knossos.

 

 

 

_______

Notes

            ¹ Boston and London: Shambhala, 2009. Barnstone also presents his translations of the poems, which of course were written in the Aiolic dialect of Mytilini, the island on which Sappho was born and lived.  Barnstone's translations, in which Sappho's “voice is clear and powerful” (Jeffrey Henderson's front matter blurb) bring out the “mellifluous Sappho...” and “the sensuous grace of her poetry...” (Diane Ackerman's front matter blurb).

            ² This line of succession was traced by Edna Zapata Manlapaz in 
“The Poetry of Manalang–Gloria: A Critical Introduction” to The Complete Poems of Angela Manalang–Gloria, ed. Manalapaz.  Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1993): 7-8.  All references to Manalang–Gloria's poems are from this volume.

            ³ As part of the colonial goal of Americanizing Philippine society.  Immediately upon taking control of the country in 1903, the authorities mandated teaching the English language and promoting American literature, a procedure that resulted in children learning what for them were of course incomprehensible expressions like “Frosty the Snowman” and “Hark, hark, the lark,” as the late Bienvenido N. Santos lost no opportunity to mention to students and colleagues when he was on the Wichita State University faculty.  Teasdale's standing has significantly declined from what it was in the 1920's and 30's, but as late as 1974 her poem “Barter” was retained by Laurence Perrine in the second edition of the textbookLITERATURE: Structure, Sound, and Sense. New York: Harcourt, 1974): 691.

            ⁴ Errina was traditionally thought to have been a student or close companion of Sappho.  Contemporary scholarship for the most part identifies her as a  4^th Century B.C. admirer of Sappho, but in either case Errina was a brilliant poetic prodigy who died at age 19.  “Cleis” is Sappho's daughter, whose name Barnstone transliterates as “Kleis.”

            5 But, cf., Manalang–Gloria's “But the Western Stars” (56), which shows that as early as January 31^st, 1928, she could shed these flaws:

                        Set me adrift on the bay tonight,

                        Tonight when the gray winds blow,

                        Over the waves to the western stars

                        My banca and I must go.

 

                        You would have built me an altar here

                        Where lingers the wave–born dew,

                        And I would have taken the silver dusk

                        To gather young dreams for you.

 

                        But the western lagoons and the lonely stars –

                        They whisper across the sea,

                        And I must away to a misty shore

                        That calls through the dark to me.

 

                        Then set me adrift on the bay tonight,

                        Tonight when the gray winds blow,

                        And over the waves to the western stars

                        Evening and I will go.

This early poem, in ballad quatrains, is one of Manalang–Gloria's best, as evidenced by its presence in the landmark Man of Earth: An Anthology of Filipino Poetry and Verse from English 1905 to the Mid-50's, ed. Gemino H. Abad [and] Edna Z Manlapaz (Quezon City, Metro Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1989): 64.  Ironically, it appeared just two days after, arguably, one of her worst poems: “Recognition” (Complete Poems 54-55). This piece is nonsensical and overblown to the doorstep of being ludicrous.  Its publication so immediately prior to one of her best efforts only shows that the then–fledgling poet was still finding her way. “The Western Stars,” however, shows that she can keep company with Sappho.  Cf, The latter's “You in Sardis” (lines 5-20 in Barnstone 62):

                        Now she shines among Lydian women

                        as after sunset

                        the rosy–fingered moon

 

                        surpasses all the stars, and the light reaches

                        equally across the salt sea

                        and over meadows steeped in flowers.

 

                        Lucent dew pours out profusely

                        on blooming roses,

                        on frail starflowers and florid honey clover.

No wonder so many commentators have seen, as Barnstone notes (167), “passionate and luminously subtle lines” in Sappho.  Teasdale, likewise, was a poet “whose poems were earnestly studied and widely imitated by nearly all would be poets” (Manlapaz 7), though it would be difficult to classify some of her poems as “luminously subtle.”

            ⁶ The storied lampoon of Sappho in playwright Antiphanes' Woman at the Festival is sometimes mentioned, but as the example of Aristophanes' play The Clouds, ridiculing Socrates, clearly shows, anyone was potentially fair game for writers of comedy.  No trace of rancor is present in either play.

            ⁷ Ironically, the poem was inspired by a harmless actual occurrence, recounted by Gemma Nemenzo in “The Enigmatic Poets,” Positively Filipino March 7, 2018: n.p.:  "But who was Soledad? Mrs. Gloria later identifyed her as Soledad 'Choleng' Lacson, her best friend in UP.... Choleng had a big crush on their Spanish professor, the poet Manuel Bernabe: 'She adored Bernabe – just something intellectual, nothing more, Mrs. Gloria confided, But Soledad's mother was sufficiently alarmed at the  infatuation that she pulled the young girl out of school and brought her home to the province."

Yet more sadly ironically, Soledad died “just a few months before the publication of her Obra Maestra, the translations of Rizal's Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo from the original Spanish to English.  Mrs. Locsin's are now considered among the best translations of the two novels.”

            ⁸ P. 404 in Edna Z. Manlapaz and Stella Pagsanghan, “A Feminist Reading of the Poetry of Angela Manalang–Gloria.” Philippine Studies 37: 389-411.

            ⁹ See my articles “Distillation and Essence: The Coherent Universe of Arturo B. Rotor,” Pilipinas 13 (Fall 1989): 1-17 and “The Prose Style of Arturo B. Rotor,” Saint Louis University Research Journal 21.1 (June 1990): 166-173.  Both are reprinted in my book Distillation & Essence: World View in Modern Philippine Literature.  Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 2002, pp. 30-49 and 50-57 respectively.

            ¹⁰This quip is not wildly hyperbolic in the context of an assessment of the overall merit of Manalang–Gloria's corpus and Trinidad L. Tarrosa–Subido's, respectively, but taken individually a Tarrosa–Subido poem like “Vanity” evokes thoughtfulness due to tis originality and multiple interpretational possibilities.  It is included in Man of Earth(112).

            ¹¹For a more detailed discussion of this point, see my article “Angela Manalang–Gloria: Alive in Both the Ice and the Fire.” Philippine Studies 50 (Fourth Quarter 2002): 557-566.

            ¹² An admirably full technical analysis of the intricate prosodic elements in Manalang–Gloria's poems can be found in the “An uninterrupted tradition”  section of Isabela Banzon–Mooney's on–line article “In Focus: Challenging Traditions: Prosody and Rhapsody In The Poetry of Angela  Manalang–Gloria.” Number 10, 2003 (HTTPS: llNCAA. Gov.PHL).  The author embeds her discussion of indigenous Philippine, Spanish, English, and American poetic traditions and practices and applies each element that she identifies to several specific Manalang–Gloria poems.  From Banzon–Mooney's commentary, was realize how much Manalang–Gloria knew about poetic theory and how gracefully she inculcated her knowledge into her poetry.  She was far from merely “Warbling wood–notes wild.”

            ¹³ Who self–describes as her “tocaya.”  The term is used to create a sense of connection and can be used informally as a greeting (in Spanish it carries the sense of somoone who has the same first name as someone else).  “Epicure” (150), another early career poem (January 22^nd, 1928) is more cute than playful, to the point od being cuddly:

                        It is very nice to sleep on a pile of

                        cushions, on mothwings of velvet...

                        lingering touches of softness... it is

                        very nice to dream on an arabesque of

                        silken peacocks and lazy tassels, for

                        the world is a little less harsh, then

                        … inarticulate flattery of cushions,

                        I love you.

 

The suspension points are a subtle touch, representing the narrator so comfy that she is falling asleep.  The poem is in the mold of Sappho's “Pleasure” (146): “on a soft pillow / I will lay down my limbs.”  The title, like others cited in this article, is Barnstone's.

            ¹⁴ Throughout The Complete Poems Barnstone uses the Aiolic transliterations, not those of Attic Greek or Latin that most people are familiar with.  Hence “Afroditi,” not “Aphrodite.”

             ¹⁵        Leave Kriti and come here to this holy

                        temple with your graceful grove

                        of apple trees and altars smoking

                        with frankincense.

 

                        Icy water babbles through the apple bramches

                        and roses leave shadow on the ground

                        and bright shaking leaves pour down

                                    profound sleep.

 

                        Here is a meadow where horses graze

                        amid wild blossoms of the spring and soft winds

                                    blow aroma.

                        Of honey.  Afroditi, take the nectar

                        and delicately pour it into  gold

                        wine cups and mingle joy with

                                    our celebration.         

 

Knossos is in Crete (Kriti), close to the modern city of Iraklion. Knossos was the center of the Minoan civilization.

            ¹⁶ Alchemy was accepted and even practiced by some individual Christians, but it has largely been looked at askance because, theologically, to try to turn base metals into gold, the goal of the alchemist, contradicted the Biblical instruction to focus on heavenly treasures.  Alchemy's secrecy, mysticism, and magic were also regarded as demonic.

            ¹⁷ Socrates was executed by drinking a cup of hemlock poison.  Ingestation of hemlock was a common method for administering the death penalty in ancient Athens.

            ¹⁸ Significantly, “god” is rendered with a lower–case “g.” Even iconoclastic Manalang–Gloria stopped short of arousing the furor  that would have been raised by “God.”

            ¹⁹ Gomorrah was destroyed by God, as was Sodom, for being a sinful city, according to Genesis 19: 23-29.

            ²⁰ Nepenthe, a mythical drug from antiquity, mentioned in Homer's Odyssey, is here, as the adjective “nepenthean,” something that induces a pleasurable state of forgetfulness, dreaminess, or sleep, particularly to forget sorrow or grief.

            ²¹ Pan is the ancient Greek woodland god, protector of shepherds, flocks, and farmers and associated with fertility. He is not mentioned by Sappho because his cult was confined to Arcadia until about 500 B.C., two centuries too late for her to have known about him.  In “May” he is presented as though he were a boon companion of the narrator's, and this is quite in keeping with the respectful yet cordial demeanor of Sappho toward Afroditi.

            ²² In Gonperz' tome Greek Thinkers: A History of Ancient Philosophy (1896-1909).

 

*****

 

Lynn M. Grow is Emeritus Senior Professor of English, Broward College, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.  He received all his degrees from The University of Southern California:  B.A., English and Philosophy, 1967; M.A., English, 1968; Ph.D., English, 1971; M.A. Philosophy, 1972.