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Aug 15, 2026
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A Musing on the Day of an Eclipse
I.
On a day, which I knew, for the augurs had rite with a bird bright-pluming,
(A bird of a make so strange, with a fear of the sky in an eye,
And an awe in the pair;) I join’d in a throng while the Sun was illuming,
And up to the sea-line trod for a death and a birth on high.
II.
There, with the quickness of eyes which have found a new matter for loving,
Swift as a god in the act, and broad as a god in scorn,
A ghost which is known as a ghost o’ the Moon, tremendous and having
Not one sound, was dark o’ the Sun and the sea and the corn.
III.
And a thrall to the light, both at noon and night, was I taken to wonder;
The night first-born in the void whereamid was the heat now frail
Breath’d a relief in an hour, which to me was an hour to ponder
The backward pow’r o’ the Sun on the sea, to the Sun as her wail:
IV.
With the softness of breath, never now overta’en by the manifold glories
Known of and heard of alone in the burning embrace of her crown,
Flown as upon many wings, in swarm, were the marvellous furies
Wave-like, dove-like, and each as a word overwrought o’ renown.
V.
And the gods were to me never kind; never did they converse in my hearing
If doves as are these, one and all, were the brood from among them or mine;
And thus, in the black of the day, with a tide as of light, I knew unto me nearing
Dumbness and numbness which is as were life if were numbless the wine.
— Illia, Aug 15, 2026
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About This Poem
Last Few Words: There were two sources of inspiration: Swinburne’s handling of anapæstic (though mostly accentual) hexameter, and the recent total solar eclipse. The piece is written so as to be read aloud, paying close attention to the relatively small, (though crucial,) number of phonetical markings, while keeping a passive count of the accents. Needless to say, this is very much a formalist piece of verse.
Style/Type: Structured: Western
Review Request Direction:
How was my language use?
What did you think of the rhythm or pattern or pacing?
How does this theme appeal to you?
How was the beginning/ending of the poem?
Is the internal logic consistent?
Review Request Intensity: I want the raw truth, feel free to knock me on my back
Editing Stage: Draft
Critiques
neopoet
23 hours 59 min ago
Neopoet AI (premium) [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem commits fully to an archaic, elevated register — the elided forms ("o' the Sun," "pow'r," "overta'en"), the inverted syntax, the invocation of augurs and gods — and that consistency of diction is itself an achievement, since the manner never slips into modern phrasing that would break the spell. The subject suits the mode: an eclipse witnessed among a throng, framed as "a death and a birth on high," carries the weight of cosmic event that this grand style is reaching for.
The strongest single image is the eclipse-shadow in stanza II: "A ghost which is known as a ghost o' the Moon, tremendous and having / Not one sound." The insistence on silence — the negation "Not one sound" landing hard at the line's turn — captures something true about how an eclipse feels, the sudden hush, and it does so without stating the feeling directly. The paradox "at noon and night" in stanza III likewise compresses the strangeness of the moment efficiently.
Where the poem tends to lose its footing is in syntactic density that crosses from difficulty into obscurity. Stanza III's final line, "The backward pow'r o' the Sun on the sea, to the Sun as her wail," is hard to parse even after several readings: the relation between "backward pow'r," "the sea," and "her wail" stays clouded, and the ambiguity feels accidental rather than designed. A clarifying pass that fixes the grammatical spine of the sentence — deciding what acts on what — would let the reader keep the music without losing the sense.
The closing line strains further: "Dumbness and numbness which is as were life if were numbless the wine." The internal rhyme of "dumbness / numbness" is a genuine effect, but the coined "numbless" placed so near "numbness," together with the doubled subjunctive "as were... if were," produces a knot that undoes the finality a last line wants. One concrete option would be to keep "Dumbness and numbness" and rebuild the second half around a single clear comparison, sacrificing "numbless" so the rhyme does not have to work twice in one breath.
A smaller matter: stanza IV's "marvellous furies / Wave-like, dove-like" introduces "furies" and "doves" that then carry into stanza V's meditation on whether the doves are "the brood from among them or mine." The thread connecting furies, doves, and the gods' indifference is intriguing but underdeveloped, so the turn in the final stanza arrives without quite enough grounding. Giving that image one more concrete anchor earlier would let the ending's question about kinship with the gods land with the force it seems to intend.
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