Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Kerouac’s "Pome on Doctor Sax" is a surreal, melancholic meditation on aging, loneliness, and the strange intersections of mythology, pop culture, and spiritual inquiry. Written in Kerouac’s characteristic spontaneous prose, the poem mythologizes Doctor Sax, a shadowy, magical figure from his youth who appeared in Doctor Sax, Kerouac’s 1959 novel blending childhood fantasy, horror, and existential reckoning. In this poem, however, Doctor Sax is no longer an enigmatic, dark conjurer of boyhood imagination but a forgotten, decrepit old man reduced to destitution in the "blighted area of SF around 3rd Street."

The poem immediately establishes Sax’s decline with imagery of Skid Row hotel rooms, placing him among society’s discarded figures. He is described as "a madhaired old genius now with hair growing out of his nose," an almost grotesque depiction that merges humor and pathos. The comparison to Aristidamis Kaldis, the Greek painter, and Daisetz Suzuki, the Zen master, places Sax in a lineage of wisdom and artistic intensity, though his appearance marks him as something archaic, almost overgrown with time. The long eyebrows, likened to "the bush of the Dharma," suggest resilience—a lifetime of accumulated knowledge and spiritual endurance that, despite everything, remains intact. This metaphor, however, is undercut by a sardonic lesson: "Let that be a lesson to all you young girls plucking your eyebrows & you (also) young choir singers jacking off behind the marechal's hilt in St Paul's Cathedral." The shift is quintessential Kerouac, blending sacred and profane, wisdom and irreverence, in a single breath.

Doctor Sax’s world is one of faded grandeur, where "his only 2 last friends in this life" are the horror film legends Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. The choice of these figures is significant—they are icons of monstrosity, actors who embodied the grotesque and supernatural on screen, now reduced to aging men paying annual visits to their equally forgotten friend. Their presence ties Sax’s character to the world of the uncanny, reinforcing his role as a spectral figure, not unlike the monsters his friends once played. The setting is thick with atmosphere—"cut thru the fogs of evening with their heads bent as the bells of St Simon tolled a heartbroken 'Kathleen' across the rooftops of old hotels." This passage evokes an almost gothic sadness, a cityscape haunted by lost time, forgotten souls, and memories of once-glorious stories now unraveling in obscurity.

The passage that follows expands on this grief-laden atmosphere, describing the old poets and drunks who populate these "homes for lost pigeons or time's immemorial white dove of the roses of the unborn astonished bliss." The phrase is a lyrical explosion of Kerouac’s signature spontaneous mysticism, where loss and nostalgia are interwoven with religious and poetic transcendence. These forgotten figures—men like Sax—are relics of a bygone world, reduced to sitting in their small rooms, drinking cheap wine and recalling the past.

The poem reaches its poignant climax when Sax, always nostalgic and aching for his past, asks his famous friends to "play the monster for me." It’s a heartbreaking request: a plea for them to revive their cinematic personas, to return briefly to the figures that once loomed larger than life in the imagination. But this is no mere indulgence in nostalgia—Sax, whose own power has waned, seeks solace in the only magic left to him, the performances of his friends. The actors, out of love and sentimentality rather than spectacle, eventually comply. Karloff "extends his arms do Frankenstein go UK!" and Lugosi "stands & arm cape & leer & approach Sax, who squealed." The moment is tragicomic—absurd yet deeply moving. Sax, reduced to ruin, takes comfort in illusion, in the last vestiges of a world where monsters and magic still held meaning.

"Pome on Doctor Sax" is a reflection on mortality and the way mythologies, whether personal or cultural, fade into obscurity. Doctor Sax, once a figure of supernatural power in Kerouac’s youth, is now an old drunk clinging to the ghosts of cinema. The poem, like much of Kerouac’s later work, is haunted by the passage of time and the inevitability of decline. Yet, in its sorrow, there is also tenderness—Kerouac does not mock Sax but mourns him, much as he mourns the vanishing figures of his own past. The poem captures the essence of Kerouac’s artistic vision: a world where reality and fantasy blur, where old poets drink in small rooms, where monks and monsters inhabit the same space, and where, even in the bleakest corners of the city, there is still some lingering, flickering sense of magic.

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