I've been posting a lot recently on the long poem, Forth of July. Will probably be slowing down a bit here in days to come, in order to focus on other projects.

There's much I haven't gotten around to yet, such as the character & some details of the 3rd & 4th books (July & Blackstone's Day-Book), what the Native American aspects represent, et al.

Moreover today it strikes me I haven't even begun to articulate the poem's real grain or pith.

The Orpheus plot is truly mythical or symbolic in a certain way. It "stands for" something : perhaps merely for a pervasive feeling or emotion.

The long poem is a poem of longing.

The keynote of "Henry's" nostalgia - situated in a rather cramped little coastal state & dreaming of wide open steppes & midwestern prairies - is also symbolic; it represents or stands for a kind of inherent, continuous radiation or radiating image from the past, from life as a whole, from childhood onward - the dream or memory of Melville's everlasting oceanic "green Tahiti of the soul." (the grassblade light.)

from Mendelssohn (the childhood neighborhood) to Mandelstam's black earth. mendel/mandel = "almond". 2 illustrations from Stubborn Grew, early & late:

The land, the land stretched out toward sundown.
At the end of the forests without end, the sun gleamed.
Magnitudes undreamt
by Greeks, the dry flute flown

 
into moist green, light fern-green
ghosts in the trees.
I'm driving the empty roads
in early May, at dawn.

 
Someone cries out Eurydice, Eurydice
into ramshackle and forlorn wastelands.
Blind joyful grief behind the railroad lines.
All gone to seed.  Oh say can you see.

 
--

 
Upon a Roman rood was fixt
clay lips gone underground.  Still
through the pinedoor, drifted sound.
Her calling me.  A morning rose.  Finixt.

 
Catch us the little foxes, Solomon,
that spoil our vineyard.  Lucky,
true love's the cardinal pt (sd Bluejay).
A monde, almond.  All made.  I thirsty, mon.