Ēostre’s Hares

[Hawkman]

Upon a midnight field
I saw a ring of hares,
dancing for Ēostre in the dark.

Backlit by the moon
their outlines glowed and interlocked,
processed in counterpoint to frost.

Summoning the spring with silent cries
they trod upon the mouldy earth
where winter’s grave will lie.

Just a wisp of memory,
a half remembered thought,
a lonely Goddess waits to do her work.

[DieterM]

To be honest, uneducated little me had to wikipedia Eostre. The article was very interesting and I came back to your poem better instructed and a little less stupid. For this, I have to thank you already. But even without that knowledge-expanding bit (which is always and per se a good thing), I have really enjoyed reading and feeling your poem. Because, and that's what good poetry always does to me, I vibrated with your ryhtm, I was there, seeing what you wanted to show, feeling what you wanted to share. A really wonderful piece!

[PrinceMyshkin]

What I especially cherish about this is how casually it begins, as if the speaker were about to impart a mundane piece of information and hardly expected usto lend him more than half an ear; and then, without overtly changing gear, it becomes something memorable before it modestly decries itself at the end with

Just a wisp of memory,
a half remembered thought

[hillwalker]

Some striking imagery - and very much a piece rooted in the earth. It's the brevity and simplicity of the poem's structure that makes this one stand out.

H

[blank|verse]

To be honest, uneducated little me had to wikipedia Eostre.
You weren't the only one, Dieter! I really should get round to reading a book of pagan mythology...

The reference puts me in mind of Ted Hughes, with which the poem shares some similarities. It evokes the early morning chill that forms an eerie backdrop to Hughes's 'The Horses' (http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=541), for instance, and is nicely achieved Hawk.

It opens like a ballad, the first two lines are pretty clean iambic trimeter, which I feel creates too strong a rhythm for the rest of the poem, which switches to free verse, so you might want to make those lines consistent with the rest.

And I think starting with the image in the second stanza ('Backlit...') might make for a stronger opening. I wasn't sure about the lone first person reference ('I saw'); without it would be to suggest this is happening away from human eyes, which is perhaps more fitting given the mystical nature of events. And I wasn't keen on 'trod' as a way of describing a hare's ungainly lolloping, especially if they have already been described as 'dancing'. But all fairly trifling issues.

Now why am I hearing Simon and Garfunkel singing...? :)

[AuntShecky]

Excellent piece of work, including the title.

Eostre (my PC, "Pong 2.0" won't make the diacritic over the initial letter for me) was/is the pagan goddess of the dawn, whose name the early fathers of the Christian Church usurped for the Feast of the Resurrection, "Easter." Your poem captures the idea of rebirth and renewal with spring supplanting "winter's grave."

I wonder if the name of this goddess has any lexical relationship to the word "estrus," referring to the time during which a female animal is fertile, or "in heat," the counterpart of the "rut" in males. This will tie into the notion in your poem with the hares, which like their cousins in the Lagomorpha order, rabbits, are thought in popular thinking to be to be overly --and rapidly --procreative.

The image of the hares in a ritual dance made me think of their symbolic and cinematic use in the movie, The Wicker Man -- the original 1975 version, definitely not the more atrocious remake with --who else?-- Nick Cage who has of late been making really bad career decisions. Since the movie depicted modern-day pagan ritual on a remote Scottish island, the mood was very sinister, culminating with an ending that was a real shockaroo. Your poem has quite a different take on nature and ritual, a positive one, with superstitious humans not part of the equation.

Speaking of superstition and whether or not someone can believe one's own eyes, you won't believe this, but way, way back in my youth-- a "pre-teen" as Americans like to call that period before adolescence-- I actually witnessed a scene similar to the one described in your poem. Back then, we lived in a working class neighborhood near the outskirts of a city, but there was, however, a field of sorts next to our two-story rented house. Late one night while looking out the window I saw some rabbits in a circle. Intermittently one by one, they would hop into the middle of the circle and then each would return to his place in the ring. Needless to say, I found it very "weird," but even at that young age, I took the scene to be part of some kind of mating ritual. Next morning I told my sisters about what I had seen, and they all thought I was crazy. Well, maybe they were right, but I know what I saw.

[_Shannon_]

Oh...this is sublime!

[Hawkman]

Dieter, thanks. I happy that you liked it so much! Just sharing a little of my pre-Christian heritage with the world :D

Prince, I'm glad you found it so effective. Of course, the wisp of memory, the half remembered thought, refers to the goddess, now largely forgotten. Thanks for liking it.

Thanks hill, glad you find it memorable.

Hi b/v, You may be right about altering the metre of the two opening lines but I'll have to think about it. I also think you may be right about opening the poem with the backlit line, in fact exchanging the first lines of S1 and S2 would work for me, although it doesn't alter the metre. The "I saw" is something I'd be inclined to leave though, as it personalises and intimate encounter with nature. Besides, I have seen Hares in a field at midnight. :D Oh, and a hare at full throttle isn't ungainly :D

Thanks for the link to the Hughes poem too. I wasn't familiar with it. I could have done without the reference to Watership Down though - lol.

Anyway, thanks for reading and your thoughtful observations.

Hi Auntie, Thanks for reading, and I believe you!

Estrus, or in English oestrus, is Latin for gadfly, meaning frenzy. The word is derived from the Greek oistros, also meaning gadfly. Ēostre the goddess as you can see is not spelled with an oe diphthong and the similarity in the sound, as far as I can see, is merely linguistic coincidence. As an Anglo-Saxon deity the name may be derived from old German, Ostara.

I'm releived you thought of The Wicker Man rather than Watership Down, anyway! Thanks for liking it. :)

Shanon, Hi, Delighted you enjoyed it.

Thanks to you all again for reading and commenting. Live and be well - H

[Delta40]

As ever, you give a wonderful presence in your work Hawk

[JuniperWoolf]

I dig it. Not enough poems dedicated to Pagan deities anymore.

[qimissung]

I love it! I love the image of the little hares, their ears pinned back moving in a stately dance in and out of the circle, in the dark, in the shadows, the silvery moon playing hide and seek with their figures. A world we never know of.

[Hawkman]

Thank you Delta, JW, and qim. Actually qim, a fully grown hare is not so little. A brown hare can be three feet long at full stretch! Arctic hares are big enough to tempt Golden Eagles. I've seen the brids hunting for them in the highlands of Scotland.

Live long and prosper. H

[Bar22do]

It's an inspired poem, Hawk! and the feeling beyond deities and words is one of an eternal ethereal dawn. And this is a balsam for the soul. Thanks for this one.

Best as always, Bar

[Hawkman]

Thank you so much, Bar. You grace my words with your appreciation. Be very well, Hawk.

[blank|verse]

Just to say that there's nothing wrong with 'Watership Down'!

Ok, they were rabbits, not hares, but the anthropomorphism in your poem is similar. It was the image of the 'ghost rabbit' at the end of the film that put me in mind of 'WD', although I think it carries greater Christian overtones than Pagan ones...