"The Last Act" by John Martin Finlay

Soundtrack to this episode

Text of poem:

The Last Act

‘Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, 

Now leaves him. 

It is too often only close to death,

or utter failure, when the mind is held

to truth, we see the outlines of the gods,

those whom we loved but never realized. 

Above us in a void burnt-out and cold,

at unfamiliar heights their forms return

like ghosts to move across the final night,

remote and unappeased in our collapse.

There is no bitterness in facing them. 

The heart that fatally kept them deprived,

and saw them hostile to the living blood,

will pay in blood its error, every vein. 

In what is not the gods are reconfirmed,

the candor of their presence briefly seen. 

The tragedy leaves nothing else but that. 

Then they are gone. The music underground,

the quiet terror of its shifting source,

its echoes vanishing moves in their place. 

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Come see my Melville lecture tomorrow on Zoom!

-New shirts!!

-The precariousness of literary preservation, and our inestimable losses

-My conversation with Tim Steele

-Wiseblood Books! 

-Finlay's Collected Prose here and Collected Poetry here

-"The Wayward Thomist" by James Matthew Wilson (COMING SOON!) 

-The gnosticism of Modernity 

-"Science, Politics, and Gnosticism" by Eric Voegelin

-"Antony and Cleopatra" by Willy Shakes

-"The God Abandons Antony" by Constantine Cavafy

-The nature of the tragic

-Negative/Apophatic Theology (Via Negativa)

-"That We Should Not Be Considered Happy Until We Are Dead" by Michel de Montaigne

-Juan de la Cruz

-hamartia, hubr

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My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
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