“Beelzebub’s Scaled Demon”
“Beelzebub and them that are with him shoot arrows” from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).
The pet
endless with scale and skeleton
As if
some troubled aristocratic Evil
had kneaded and ground
the beginning and end
of Scheme
into a heap of muscle
An epitome of skilled bones
unwinged and unplumbed
– with the ultimate of moves
absence of extremities
yet with spit and fang
from dankest of Earth pits
The body of the
Originals
performed in Eden’s knowing greenery
– lush as a bed of worms
Serpent as depicted in Bible Artist Unknown
Committed in secrecy
hissed with teeth and poisoned fruit
in leaves thick with seed
After the performance to end all
with disgraced intelligence
tongued the air and dirt
coiled in polished skin
strikes
But by cursed feet
doomed to stomach squirming
kicked by Eden’s children
and fashioned into their accessories
Mina Loy elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary and religious highs by capturing her Mind’s Eye in “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” as she paints a majestic picture of a bird in flight. Utilizing Biblical events and symbolism, the reader experiences an eagle often representative of God, the way Loy wants us to feel it. By elevating an almost ordinary, yet powerful representative of an eagle enlisting religious imagery, Loy succeeds in outfitting her poem with “hyperaesthesia” (Loy, line 26).
Testing the influence of faculty in Loy’s “Golden Bird,” I decided to employ the same types of illustrations to a figure just as powerful but revered in a dark and sinister fashion. Attempting to describe the true essence of the serpent in Genesis was entertaining and eye-opening because it allowed me to use modernism’s anti-Romantic and “aesthetic disposition” as described in his email recapping our first class’ discussion (Prof. VZ).