"May My Enemy Be Assuaged" by Derek Walcott

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Fallout from last week

-The poetry-prose spectrum, and those pesky in-betweeners

-Amphibrachs for days

-Parallelism, and how to sound "biblical"

-The universal accessibility of beauty

-Rain on a sunny day is called WHAT?

-The feminization of landscape

-Hopefully the only time I'll mention Kanye on this show.

-Hopkins cameo!

-Totally tubular priests

-If it ain't Baroque...

-My excursion to the Virgins

-The myth of the Noble Savage (Rousseau sucks eggs)

-It always comes back to Adam and Eve

-Spacetime as a fresco of divine art 

-Toggling between the cosmic and the moral world 

Text of lyric: 

May my enemy be assuaged by these waves
 because they are beautiful even to his evil,
 may the drizzle be a benediction to his heart
 even as it is to mine; they say here that the devil
 is beating his wife when the sun shines through the wires
 of fine, fine rain. It is not my heart that forgives
 my enemy his obscene material desires
 but the flare of a leaf, the dart of a mottled dove,
 the processional surplices of breakers entering the cove
 as penitents enter the dome to the lace of an altar;
 beauty so shaping neither condemns nor saves
 like the tenets of my enemy’s church, the basilicas
 of tumbling cherubs and agonized saints and riots
 of purpureal cloud; though I have cause
 I will share the world’s beauty with my enemies
 even though their greed destroys the innocence
 of my Adamic island. My enemy is a serpent
 as much as he is in a fresco, and he in all his
 scales and venom and glittering head is
 part of the island’s beauty; he need not repent.