Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: fairytale

  • The Wild Swans

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    The Wild Swans (1962)

    Once upon a time, in a kingdom of the shore

    A wicked witch queen out of envious spite

    turned her eleven stepsons into swans, wherefore

    Elisa the dolorous sister drifted away in a plight

    Till she chanced upon the fairy queen in her chariot

    Who saw the golden heart of the princess that moved

    The fairy caprice and told her with thorny nettles to knit

    Shirts for the swans to break the spells with her lips sealed;

    Such was Elisa’s vow, and the vow took her to her encounter

    With a gallant beauteous king of the strange land faraway

    Falling for her silent beauty, keeping her in his chamber of amour;

    But the zealous archbishop and his ilk viciously sent her away

    To a stake for witchery, for her silence was otherworldly;

    As the ambers of fire were bursting around her fast and faster

    The swans with crowns appeared in the dusky sky from the yonder

    And Elisa threw the shirts at the swans, and lo! the men stood there;

    Then the fiery fires blossomed into pretty white flowers around Elisa

    Lying on the bed of the flowers, which the king plucked and placed

    Upon his lover’s bosoms with drops from his welkin eyes, whereupon

    Her spirit returned from a departure to the ether exalted, elated

    By the end of the old and the beginning of a new life in the kingdom

    Where there’s no other world beyond the lovers’ union heart-to-heart. 

     

    P.S: One of my favorite fairytales of all time is “The Wild Swans” by Hans Christian Andersen because of the travails that the princess Elisa endured for the love of her brothers and her fathomless patience akin to that of martyrs of the early Church in spite of unthinkable pains of horrendous tortures and gruesome ways of execution for their unswerving faith. What’s more, I love the fact that the king was not only infatuated with her external beauty but also her internal virtue distinguished from all other beautiful women who would vie for his kingly attention. Their love was no less glorious than that of Romeo and Juliet, for the king loved her for the dangers she had passed, and she loved him that he loved all about her, still and ever. Hence this is my contribution to #FairytaleTuesday whose theme for today is a fairytale with an element of lovers in love on Twitter. 

  • Moonstruck

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    Up in the misty airy mountain yonder

    Where trees and flowers never wither

    The lunar beauty comes upon her

    and covers her with a veil of silver

    with a wreath of stars on her hair

    In the luster of amaranthine glamor;

     

    Then her eyes gather light and fire

    Burning with felicity, rapture, or desire

    Like a condensed colossal meteor

    Wrapped in mystic eternal camphor

    in serene brilliance of Moon’s Sphere

    growing bright and glowing brighter;

     

    Nymphs and fairies weave into the ether

    The melodies of Aeolian harps sweeter

    Softer than the milky way’s gossamer

    Allaying the wild untamed waves of dander –

    Her heart entranced with elevated Passion

    Forgetting the nobility of exalted Reason.

     

    P.S.: Fairie-tale is a fantastic means of translating an Author’s inmost feelings, deep-set emotions, and solipsistic philosophy smothered under the necessity of fulfilling demands placed upon daily tasks in existential life in the safest and, therefore, the most eloquent fashion the Author can rely on. As Edmund Spencer, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, and John Keats all used faeries as their faithful and wonderful subjects of their imaginative kingdoms, so do I take the liberty of doing the same as a way of escapism to the Otherworld where I can become all I want to morph into and enjoy what I covet without a moral qualm in the reign of religiosity. Here the subject of the poem is a maiden desiring of beauty which she believes to have been forfeited or deprived of by the callously whimsical play with her fate by the supernatural powers-that-be on a lark. 

  • alchemist and four fairies

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    An old alchemist had assistants

    Of Craft from Titania’s Kingdom

    And they worked for him at nights

    in return for fairy food abloom.

     

    Salamander belched out a fire

    Under the tripod holding a beaker

    In shrill forever fiery yellow ire

    that grew hotter and madder;

     

    Until Undine’s Purified Water

    From the well of Fairy Realm

    Boiled and bubbled in the beaker

    She watched with pensive calm;

     

    As Gnome put a sorcerer’s stone

    As black as the Stygian River

    From the bottom of Earth alone

    Into the Water like a wise thinker;

     

    While Sylph was breathing Air

    Into the Earth joined with the Water

    And the Fire in the Craft of Wonder

    Creating Gold and Elixir in Splendor.

     

    P.S.: The fundamental personality types are sanguine – red (hopeful), choleric-yellow (ireful), melancholic -black (shy), and phlegmatic -blue (calm). In fairy-tale theory, the following fairies represent the four elements: Sylphs – air (red), Salamanders – fire (yellow), Gnomes -earth (black), and Undines – water (blue) . Hence this poem is an amalgam of the aforesaid theories conjured up in my mind’s eye.

  • Fairy-Tale Tuesday: Queen Titania and her Courtesans

    P.S: It’s Fairy-tale Tuesday on Twitter, and this is my poesy contribution to the weekly fairy twitter feast for those of you who take a fancy to fanciful elements and dwell in the beauty of the mysterious nature.