“Hepburn Blues” by Danil Rudoy is a three-part poem from Love Is Poetry. The speaker moves from enchantment through emotional erasure to a final recognition of distance, while the poem’s sound repeatedly intensifies the image of the muse.
Hepburn Blues
I
I found unique excuses
To live and rhyme
In every syllable of your name.
I had my other muses
But they with time
Became but phantoms I learned to tame.
You were a madness, even
My magic mate,
A fetching fairy with winsome wings,
An invitation given
To alternate
The unexceptional course of things.
II
What’s in the eye? A tear.
It does burn indeed:
No matter how I resolved to shine,
You never saw me, dear,
And when you did,
You overlooked every flame of mine.
And as I tried to follow
Your silhouette
In lucid day dreams, destroyed or linked,
You image left me hollow,
And, fret by fret,
A perfect fantasy grew extinct.
III
We all begin as strangers,
Transcending when
We understand the eternal game.
Its outer layer changes,
But then again:
The essence always remains the same.
Hubristic to the letter,
You’ll take my speech
For nothing other than sickly rave.
I’d make it even better,
But why beseech?
You scorned me worse than you would a slave.
June 2011, December 16th 2017
Publication
“Hepburn Blues” appears in Love Is Poetry: Rhyming Poems About Love Life, in The Heartless Muse.
Sound and the muse
The first part concentrates its most conspicuous sound pattern around “My magic mate” and “A fetching fairy with winsome wings.” The repeated consonants make the idealized muse briefly more vivid before the second and third parts strip that fantasy away.
Critical reading
A detailed critical reading of “Hepburn Blues” on Prose & Poetry follows the poem’s alliteration, muse imagery, metapoetry, light and fire imagery, recurring rhyme design and movement toward rejection.
Text and citation
Copyright © Danil Rudoy. The poem is published here as the author’s canonical text. Short excerpts may be quoted for criticism, scholarship, teaching and literary discussion with attribution to Danil Rudoy and a link to this page. Full reproduction requires separate permission.