A Poet Reflects

Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.

Why did I stop? Did some instinct
discern a shape, the artist in me
intervening to stop traffic, as it were?

A shape. Or fate, as the poets say,
intuited in those few long ago hours—

I must have thought so once.
And yet I dislike the term
which seems to me a crutch, a phase,
the adolescence of the mind, perhaps—

Still, it was a term I used myself,
frequently to explain my failures.
Fate, destiny, whose designs and warnings
now seem to me simply
local symmetries, metonymic
baubles within immense confusion—

Chaos was what I saw.
My brush froze—I could not paint it.

—Louise Glück, opening lines to “Afterword,” from Poetry (January 2012)

Fate

Two shall be born the whole world wide apart,
And speak in different tongues, and pay their debts
In different kinds of coin; and give no heed
Each to the other’s being. And know not
That each might suit the other to a T,
If they were but correctly introduced.
And these, unconsciously, shall bend their steps,
Escaping Spaniards and defying war,
Unerringly toward the same trysting-place,
Albeit they know it not. Until at last
They enter the same door, and suddenly
They meet. And ere they’ve seen each other’s face
They fall into each other’s arms, upon
The Broadway cable car—and this is Fate!

—Carolyn Wells, from She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (University of Iowa Press, 1997)

“Fate is never fair.  You are caught in a current much stronger than you are; struggle against it and you’ll drown not just yourself but those who try to save you.  Swim with it, and you’ll survive.” 

—Cassandra Clare, from City of Ashes (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2009)

“Every path but your own is the path of fate.  Keep on your own path, then.”

—Henry David Thoreau, from Walden (Ticknor and Fields, 1854)

poetbabble:

Whether you love what you love or live in divided ceaseless revolt against it, what you love is your fate.

- Frank Bidart