“My Muse” by Danil Rudoy is a 2008 English rhyming poem from Love Is Poetry. A black-and-blue room is interrupted by the Muse in red; her arrival restores courage, artistic purpose and the urge to live, while her disappearance returns the speaker to silence and mourning chords.
My Muse
I sit and ponder random things
Extracting music from the strings.
The room is colored blue and black:
These hues, I think, I’ll never lack.
You knock on my forgotten door
And bring me all that I adore:
Composure, courage and the urge
From self-destruction to emerge.
My Muse! You make me freeze at once
And wait for your approving glance,
Since all I did before you came
Had neither worth, nor use, nor aim.
You’re dressed in red from head to toe…
You soar above – I dwell below;
You talk to gods – I laugh at kings;
You have no flaws – I have no wings!
You know me well enough to take
Away the evil and the fake,
And give me all for what I ask,
Although it’s not an easy task…
The silence has to be destroyed:
You look exhausted and annoyed,
But I’m afraid that if I speak
I’ll make you more fatigued and sick.
I can’t pretend to be polite:
I take a pen and start to write
Portraying your immortal heart
In every form of human art.
You know how much I cried and prayed!
I need you now! – you need to fade!
I can’t destroy this old routine
And stop the fall of guillotine.
You vanish, turning into smoke,
Some incense I cannot evoke,
A tasteless fog, a vapid mist.
The red is gone: I end my feast.
The silence all my bliss absorbs
And I return to mourning chords.
The room, again, is black and blue:
I write a requiem for you.
2008
Publication
“My Muse” appears in Love Is Poetry: Rhyming Poems About Love Life, in the opening movement, The Marriage Market.
In Love Is Poetry
The poem establishes several forces that recur across the collection: love as artistic command, the beloved woman as a measure of value, rhyme as emotional discipline, and the movement between exaltation and collapse. Its color architecture is unusually strict. Blue and black frame the speaker’s solitude; red belongs to the Muse; when red disappears, the opening colors return and the poem closes where it began.
Critical reading
A detailed critical reading of “My Muse” on Prose & Poetry follows the poem’s color architecture, sound, apostrophe, paired rhyme, disappearance and final requiem.
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.