Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "The Necromancers" is a poem of spectacle and memory, infused with a sense of performance and fatalism. It moves between the circus-like imagery of clowns on monocycles and deeper recollections of past passions, creating a meditation on the fleeting nature of desire, time, and the cyclical quality of experience. The poem’s structure, with its opening and closing stanzas mirroring each other, reinforces the notion of repetition—of past joys returning as ghosts, of the spinning wheel of fortune that gives and takes away.

The first stanza immediately establishes a theatrical tone: Clowns in a garish air. On panicky pedals / Managing monocycles for dear life. The phrasing suggests not just literal clowns, but a metaphorical performance, a balancing act that mirrors human experience. The phrase for dear life heightens the tension, as though existence itself is precarious, requiring constant movement to stay upright. This image transitions into one of fortune’s fickleness: And the heart pumps a ruby hoop—Fortuna’s. Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck, is often associated with the Wheel of Fortune, which spins unpredictably, raising and lowering people at whim. The ruby hoop suggests both a prize and a cycle, a closed loop of fate where love and desire rise and fall like circus tricks. The final line of the stanza introduces a strikingly violent contrast: The princess flings our halo, knife by knife. The presence of knives suggests danger within this spectacle, an element of risk that turns love or admiration into something perilous. The halo, an emblem of purity or divinity, being thrown like knives implies that idealized emotions—whether love, faith, or aspiration—are subject to disillusionment or betrayal.

The second section shifts from the stylized imagery of the circus into a deeply sensual recollection, one that borders on the hallucinatory: Tally the take in that affair with glory. This line suggests an evaluation of a past experience, almost as if love (or passion) were a financial transaction with gains and losses. The speaker then describes himself in a moment of surrender: How I lay gaudy on the barbarous shore / Face burrowing in a patch of fern, blood stirring / Gamy as wines remembering summer stir. The diction here is lush and evocative—gaudy implies both extravagance and excess, while barbarous shore situates this memory in an untamed, primal landscape. The wines remembering summer suggests nostalgia, as though the speaker’s very blood retains the taste and heat of past pleasure.

The next lines reinforce the idea that the body itself carries the imprint of memory: No vein of all this flesh but leapt with memory: / Such splendor on lip and finger and the rest / As noon on a great range of sea, as heaven’s / Moody amour, confusing east and west. The phrase leapt with memory makes recollection almost physical, as if past joys still animate the speaker’s body. The comparison to noon on a great range of sea reinforces the idea of dazzling, overwhelming intensity, while heaven’s moody amour suggests divine but unstable passion, something celestial yet unpredictable.

The setting then shifts to a maritime landscape, where love is both abundant and volatile: In grottos hung with cork and cordage bobbling / On halcyons where the lascar and his shade / Lay fecund in feluccas, hearts atumble / Made love a plague of angels, raving, unmade. The nautical imagery—cordage bobbling, halcyons, feluccas (a type of boat)—creates a dreamlike, fluid setting, where love is an uncontrollable force, almost a disease (plague of angels). The contrast between love’s creation and destruction is emphasized in the final phrase: raving, unmade—as if the intensity of passion leads inevitably to dissolution.

The next lines deepen the tension between sweetness and weight, pleasure and premonition: Deep comas of the sun! My loafing shoulder / Ached for the sweetness pillared on your palm. The phrase comas of the sun implies an intoxicating warmth, almost like a stupor induced by desire, but the word ached introduces an undertone of longing, of something lost. This feeling of impending loss is reinforced by the auditory imagery: Ear to the ground heard dusky tambours: coming. / A crackle of skirt, sails bantering with calm. The sounds here—tambours (drums), crackle, bantering—suggest movement, as if the moment of joy is already shifting, about to be disrupted.

A crucial moment follows: The weight of sweetness then! I saw it settle / (Curled on a whirling skirt) in my dark / And jubilant: honey and sun, the blood! The phrase weight of sweetness suggests that even pleasure carries a burden, that joy is never entirely light or free. The reference to honey and sun, the blood! evokes both richness and mortality, the confluence of life’s greatest pleasures and its inescapable decay. The next lines, Music / Demurred from the warm dark: inhuman stream! introduce an eerie shift—music, which might traditionally enhance pleasure, here demurs, hesitates, as if warning of something beyond human control.

The final part of this section fully embraces a sense of haunting: A voice from long ago. And the warm darkness / Shuddered how often on the barbarous shore / Since two defied, palms conjuring, a bayou / The bitterns boom adieu, and guard no more. The phrase a voice from long ago suggests a return of the past, while the warm darkness shuddered gives the moment a spectral quality. The phrase two defied implies a past act of rebellion—perhaps love defying time, fate, or societal constraints—but the reference to adieu signals that whatever was once protected (guard no more) has now slipped away.

Then, the inevitable return of the opening imagery: The wheel that fractured light has come full-circle. / Leans with the poky spoke dust deepens on. The wheel that fractured light evokes both the Wheel of Fortune and a shattered prism, something that once dazzled but now fades into dust. This fading is emphasized in the closing stanza, which repeats the first: Clowns in a garish air. On panicky pedals / Managing monocycles for dear life. / And the heart pumps a ruby hoop—Fortuna’s. / The princess flings our halo, knife by knife. The return of these lines reinforces the poem’s structure as a cycle—joy, loss, nostalgia, performance, and ultimately, the recognition that everything repeats, that we are always caught in Fortuna’s spinning wheel.

"The Necromancers" is a poem of dualities—performance and reality, pleasure and fear, love and loss. Its lush imagery and fluid shifts in time create a hypnotic effect, drawing the reader into a world where memory is both intoxicating and inescapable. The repetition of the opening lines at the end suggests that no matter how far we move, we always return to the same performances, the same illusions, the same hauntings of desire and fate.

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