I am more than a little awed by it -- I feel that my first reading barely scratched its depths.

Thank you very, very much. I do not know that you need to feel awed by anything I write, but I am very glad that it resonates with you.

I must with some shyness confess to being woefully underread not only in classical poetry but virtually in poetry's entire arc.

I can certainly recommend you some classical poets, although I have a difficult time recommending translations. (If you read two or three at once, you can get a better sense of the work as a whole rather than each translator's particular filter, but that presupposes that you can get, say, three comparable translations of Lucan that don't suck. Your chances improve with things like the Odyssey.) Once past late antiquity, I'm very touch and go until the nineteenth century, and we're still only talking Western poetry. I like Ikkyu.

I've read some Hebrew poetry and Shakespeare and bits of Poe and Crane and Eliot and Auden and Hacker and Kinnell -- and not much else save oddments of English greats, and none of it enough for deep intimacy.

Even so, who or what do you like best? Or what interests you most, which may be a different question?

And yet phrases like (but of course no two are alike) "threshings of godhead" and lines like (and otherwise) "the smart of pennyroyal on his tongue like a word / he had forgotten to say" are deeply thrilling and light up the palace of possiblity in new ways, flicker through scrims of gem and leaf.

That is beautiful criticism to receive. Thank you. I mean that.

Have you written of the poem's background or constellations of allusion?

I think it's a straightforward midrash for the Homeric Hymn to Demeter: I was struck by the story of Demophoon, first just for the image of the child torn misguidedly out of a gift of godhood—Metaneira sees her son burning in the fire where the disguised Demeter has been placing him night after night to burn off his mortality, anointing him with ambrosia by day; not totally without reason, she leaps to the conclusion that the old wandering woman she engaged as a nurse is murdering her child—and then for all the echoes that go with it. Demeter is a mother who has lost her child, not quite to death, because Persephone is a goddess still and immortal: then again, Hades is the eponym of death, his house the underworld, and so to be taken by him in person, wedded to him, is perhaps truer and more awful than simply ceasing to be; the point is, Demeter knows grief and bereavement, and with a mother's sympathy and a god's overcompensation she is trying somehow to make them up to her mortal benefactor, making her child unassailable where Demeter's own was so terribly not. The trouble is that Metaneira does love her son. When she finds him in a fireplace, she's going to freak. And thinking that she is saving his life, she pulls him back into death instead. τιμὴ δ᾽ ἄφθιτος αἰὲν ἐπέσσεται, Demeter finally tells her, imperishable honor will be on him always, but it feels like a consolation prize, something salvaged from the ruin.

ἀγρόμεναι δέ μιν ἀμφὶς ἐλούεον ἀσπαίροντα
ἀμφαγαπαζόμεναι: τοῦ δ᾽ οὐ μειλίσσετο θυμός:
χειρότεραι γὰρ δή μιν ἔχον τροφοὶ ἠδὲ τιθῆναι.

And gathered around him, [his sisters] washed him as he struggled
and cradled him lovingly: but his heart would not be comforted,
because worse nurses and nurturers held him now.

So I wondered not if, but how much he would remember of what he had lost.

Anyway I shall return.

I look forward.

Congratulations on the placement of the new poem.

Thank you! I keep saying that, but it is heartfelt!