The Alchemist

A lot of people are scared of poetry, and I think it’s poems like this that scare them the most. It’s not something that’s so far out that it clearly intends to make no (obvious) sense, but it’s abstract and “poetic” enough to be a lot more obtuse than people may be used to. But poetry like this — and all poetry, really — is meant to be savored, to be read over and over again, to be excavated like a fossil dig or unpacked like a suitcase. People are afraid of doing the work necessary to read poetry; they’d rather skim a Twitter thread or bask in the light of a TikTok like some sort of perpetually chilled Komodo dragon. But we are not Komodo dragons — we should do the work.

But I digress. Yes, this poem is dense, abstract, maybe even obtuse, but that’s partly why I love it so much. Despite all my claims of obscurity, I think the gist of the poem is pretty clear, even after a first reading: the speaker has actively sought an anodyne to her emotions and failed. More than that, the speaker has tried to use intellect to eradicate her feelings, and so we find ourselves in one of my favorite arenas of thought, the sempiternal battle between Reason and Emotion (Plato), between the Mind and the Body (Descartes), between Thinking and Feeling (Rousseau). On the most basic level, the speaker here has tried to subsume feeling to thinking, and it hasn’t really worked. Shocker!

But the poem is so much more than the summary! (Which, I should point out, is the true way to determine whether something is Art, but that’d be another digression.) Let’s excavate each stanza and see what dinosaur bones we find.

Bogan begins by invoking fire — the quintessential image of desire and lust and passion and appetite — and we have our first twist already in the second line. This isn’t a flame of passion, no! This is the fire of destruction, the conflagration that burns away impurities and leaves only the best behind — or so the speaker hopes. Of course, the speaker isn’t exactly trying to get rid of the impurities but rather change them into something else, transform them into a better version of themselves: a “passion wholly of the mind” and “ecstasy come to breath alone.” As so many before her have done, Bogan has tied passion to the body, specifically to lowly, grounded things like bone (as opposed to the “breath” of the ecstasy she seeks). And we see this again in the last line of the first stanza, in the “flawed light of love and grief” — we think of light, generally, as something that brings insight and wisdom, something that illuminates, but also as something that comes from above — the sun, the moon, the stars, the overhead lamp. But the light we find at the end of the stanza — put on a metrical pedestal by the two stressed syllables slammed together in the middle of relatively regularly iambic tetrameter — is flawed because it doesn’t come from the mind and it doesn’t come from above; instead, it comes from the grounded, body-based urges she’s trying to purify.

If the first stanza shows us Bogan’s alchemist trying to transmute bodily emotion to something purer via the intellect, then the second stanza gives us the result. Just as the alchemists of yore never found the way to transmute lead to gold, Bogan’s alchemist fails, too. In nearly perfect iambic tetrameter, the first two lines call up a beat (a heartbeat?) as “existence and desire” are subjected to the alchemical fire — Note that these two words, ‘existence’ and ‘desire’, call chiastically to the ‘love’ and ‘grief’ of the first stanza’s last line; the speaker here has a very clear idea of what she’s trying to transmute, doesn’t she? — but that beat, transmuted to the meter of the poem, is almost immediately interrupted by the heavy, heavy stresses of the first half of the third line. Although you can force iambs into those two feet with an exaggerated sing-song, the line fights against it. Further, these two lines are the first that are not an enjambed couplet — the thought of the first line stops abruptly at the end of the first line, even though all the preceding couplet’s have conveyed a single thought across both lines. This, too, disrupts the ‘beat’ of both the poem and the action it records. The fire is gone now *dying “low,” another reference to directionality), and the desired result (see what I did there?) is not found. Instead, the speaker finds “unmysterious flesh,” an odd phrase that leads me to straight to religion, specifically Christianity, where the phrase “mysteries of the flesh” alludes both to the unique state we experience as bodies and to the Incarnation of God as Jesus Christ in an attempt to redeem us of our sins. I’m still struggling with this line myself — it seems a bit out of place in a poem that has, up until now, been pretty secular, but I can envision a subtle movement from the rational Thought of the first stanza to a more spiritual not-body of the second. There’s also the whole Passion of the Christ, His suffering through Crucifixion and whatnot, that I think echoes here as well.

But let’s get back to that unmysterious flesh, shall we? If Bogan intended the allusions to religion, she specifically wants to counter them — this is not the mysterious (sinful) flesh of the Spirit that the speaker’s left with but rather the mundane, earthly flesh that’s still passionate, still full of love and grief and existence and desire. And Bogan’s speaker — if not Bogan herself — isn’t happy about it. After all, she “broke [her] life” to get rid of that mundane flesh because of the pain it caused her. (Again, cf. the Passion of Christ, perhaps, or at least the “relief” the speaker seeks in the first stanza.) There’s no wild epiphany here that life is better when you feel; she may be agreeing with Rousseau when he says he felt before the thought, but she certainly isn’t saying it’s a good thing. The speaker seems, almost, to be in shock at the end of the poem — I picture her with a lump of flesh in her hand, a still-beating heart perhaps — but I think Bogan knew what was coming all along. The poem is, ultimately, about the futility of trying to think away your emotions, the inability to attain “the mind’s avid substance” — but that phrase, ‘avid substance,’ is curious in and of itself. ‘Avid’ comes from the Latin word ‘avidus,’ which means ‘greedy’ or ‘eager’ — it’s the same root that gives us the English word ‘avarice’ — and if you trace the etymology even farther back, you find words like ‘want’ and ‘desire.’ So even when describing her ideal substance purified of bodily longing and passion, the speaker can’t get away from desire.