1/31/2026 I Have Been Thinking About This Song for Three Days

I believe there are great songs out there with simple lyrics which merit derives from their music or style of delivery - either because the music lends new meaning to otherwise simple messages, or the lyrics serve as unobtrusive vehicles for the music. "Flamingo" by Kero Kero Bonito probably fits into that category. The meaning of the lyrics is very simple, but the unique music gives it a playfulness that, while not suggesting irony, does give a sense of self-awareness. Do you get what I mean? I have only gathered this from other people's opinions about music.

I have heard plenty of love songs that seem to only be about love because they have to. Do I really care about the romance of "Sticker" by NCT 127? I don't know. (Although most of the lyrics don't stick out to me because they're Korean, I certainly don't give a fuck about the English lines either.) 

I find it impossible to believe that I am meant only to focus on the fast-paced instrumental of "Lipstick" from NCT 127's 2021 Japanese album "Loveholic", though. It's too lyrically dense for me to ignore what's being said. 

In my opinion, "Loveholic" was not NCT's best work. "gimme gimme" is probably my least favorite 127 title track. It has none of the stupid charm of earlier Japanese track "Chain". It feels ridiculous. It feels Stray Kids. On first listen, I was also unimpressed by "Lipstick", about which I had heard some. Now I cannot imagine why I felt that way. 

As of writing this, I haven't even read the translation, and yet I am sure this is probably one of the more explicitly sexual of 127's songs. It's not much, but I cannot help even comparing it to Taeyong's masochistic rap in "Baby Don't Like It".

"You are like an actress (woo), you have a shining status (uh-huh)
Girl, you dress to impress, I embrace you
I wanna get you in bed, ha!"

Like first of all what are we talking about. Second of all I am obsessed with the cheekiness of the lyrics paired with the very serious instrumental. I would expect a song like this to focus primarily on personal luxury, with romance taking the back seat (a la "Bad Alive" by WayV, which only really gets romantic in the bridge). But the Bentley is quickly forgotten here in favor of a woman's luscious lips and makeup skills - so the energetic music no longer represents the luxurious backdrop of a fling but the fling itself. Is it stupid that I find myself moved by such a picture of romance? That I am analyzing the relationship portrayed in a fucking NCT b-side?

I talk about this kind of love song like it's entirely foreign, which is ridiculous. There are a thousand other songs that fit this description, such as Sisqó's "Thong Song", another genuinely beautiful work. I just think these songs ought to be appreciated for the perspective they offer. Get serious about that lipstick, boys.

Highlights:

• The prechorus and bridge, which are some of the most static elements of K-pop songs, are sort of snoozefests - but the verses are really fun. I speak of "時には sweetie, 今度は cutie" and "無邪氣に girly, 今夜は sexy!" (the latter of which, contrary to what Genius writes, is definitely said by Yuta, not Haechan). I can't get those parts specifically out of my head.
• "狂わせる lipstick" - fuck yeah.
• If the rest of the song is all over the place, then the dance break is a mess. It's almost not sexy anymore. We get it. You really fuck with that lipstick.

1/29/2026 Is Romantic Love Real? And Other Pretentious Questions

• Is it possible for a person to feel so strongly for another person? Like in real life? - to find them beautiful for a few months, I mean, before settling again into loneliness and unfulfillment? Is sleeping next to them refreshing? Or does it take away from you like everything else?
• Why do people like computer keyboards that sound like shit? Keyboards the ASMR community say sound "creamy" really give me the feeling that I'm vomiting up a Labubu 
• How much guilt should I be feeling right now? 

1/28/2026 The Little Beauties of EXO

It is the day after 127 day and I am writing about EXO! Good God!

EXO is relevant to my life right now and I am not sure why. They did have a comeback recently, but it lacked two of their main vocalists for complicated legal reasons and also apparently half of the music video is AI-generated. The goat has been washed, so to speak, for around three years now, I fear.

And yet I find myself thinking about Chanyeol more and more frequently. I don't even fuck with Chanyeol like that. I'm just thinking about him.

Do I think EXO has a superior discography? Certainly superior to most groups'; I do fear they were most active at a time when it was simply unheard of to make good music, resulting in songs like "Ko Ko Bop" and "Love Shot" (please don't kill me). However, the main vocalists of EXO - I refer to Chen, Baekhyun, D.O. (Kyungsoo), and at one point Luhan - possess some of the highest, clearest, handsomest tones I have ever heard. I think people who composed for EXO understood this, generally, so EXO songs are set apart to me by the beauty of their melodies.

Their debut song "MAMA", released in Korean and Chinese, starts with this crazy high note. Here is D.O. singing in the Korean version.

Here is Chen singing in the Chinese version.

 (You can hear how much sharper Chen's high tone is.)

What interests me most about these kinds of parts is their flashy melody, not just their virtuosity. That climb from a fifth to a major seventh shows up again in "Wolf".

I'm going to assign you the Herculean task of ignoring everything else but the music in this clip, including D.O. sounding like the guy from Fall Out Boy and Kai's flagrant cultural appropriation, both of which are important topics, if the latter more so. The song is also bad. Sorry about that.

The producers have supplemented Chen's shaky high note with a blindingly tight harmony not uncommon in any K-pop song of this time, and certainly not uncommon in EXO's music. Also not surprising is the insanity that is the range of the chorus melody, which was originally a whole step higher (try not to laugh). I find it interesting that the first phrase ends on the third scale degree.

Then, at the end of the second chorus phrase, the high note. When I heard it for the first time I was floored. What a direction to take this song in! I have cut the clip off as abruptly as the high note was cut off in the song, because the producers did have an obligation to remind us that the song is bad, and that any semblance of good music is to be pruned lest it infect the tree. 

Finally I will draw attention to the famous bridge of "Tempo", released in 2018.

The "I can't believe" part is more significant considering it's a callback to the intro of the song.

The first real chill-inducing moment is the relaxation into the sweet "Nareul gamssa aneun yuilhan namanui savior" after that jazzy first motive. The second is the gentle little "Modu geureon neol baraboge dwae" before Baekhyun comes in swinging and Suho echoes him. Contradictory to EXO's wishes as expressed in the chorus (do not mess up their tempo), the tempo of this song is both held (in a literal sense) and disrupted (in a metaphorical sense) throughout. While underneath the acapella harmonies do not change tonally, Suho's gentle inquiries that begin the bridge contrast with Baekhyun's aggression nicely.

Anyway, here was me getting pretentious about EXO. Here before Baekhyun goes to jail for tax evasion. (For legal reasons that is a joke.) 

1/26/2026 Grinding

Superstar SMTOWN is a cruel mistress.

In my introductory blog post, I mentioned that gameplay involves a lot of leveling up cards, like in Project Sekai - and now that I have verified the definition of "gacha game" it is occurring to me that this blog may become a log of my gambling addiction. Fuck.

So be it. 

Anyway, my main card-upgrading strategy is to sacrifice every card I receive of a member of Super Junior. I have no Super Junior cards; I sacrifice them all when there is an occasion to level up another card. Collecting SuJu cards is my very last priority.  

Joy's gaping maw receives the sacrifices of Kyuhyun and Zhoumi. (Neither card succeeded.)

My secondary strategy is to sacrifice a) duplicate cards in lower grades (why have a C-tier "Obsession" themed Sehun card if I already have a B-tier one?) or b) duplicate cards in the same grade that I don't feel like using to make cards go up a grade (for example, if I max out two C-tier identical "Married to the Music" themed Minho cards, I can combine them into one B-tier card). 

I could've combined these two Kais, but IDRGAF, so I sacrificed one to the other.

Click to see my cool cards.

This week, "Something's in the Water" by RIIZE became playable on Superstar SM. During events like these, there will usually be special "event" cards listed as separate from the regular group cards, and with fancy borders and shit. There are also missions attached to it - missions involving collecting a certain amount of event cards and getting a specific score on the song. I have five out of six cards in various grades, but only some are rewards for doing the missions: after a while they just expect you to buy the rest using diamonds, a currency notoriously difficult to attain.

Phase one of the missions. How am I to survive in these conditions?  

You can see where they stopped giving me cards.

The higher your card grade and star-level on a card, the more points you gain by hitting notes while that card is on the screen. Therefore, if I don't have high enough grade cards, I will never get 2,000,000 points - and the challenge ends tomorrow!!! 

Fuck, this is embarrassing. If I complete all three phases, all I'll get is a wallpaper. But I also want to win! I want to get it all done!!

Superstar SMTOWN really is an ingenious game model. There are so many groups under SM, and many of them are still releasing music, giving it a large and ever-expanding music library and therefore an ever-expanding library of cards. I guess that's the premise of every rhythm game, though. 

1/25/2026 Crochet Time!

I have always envied people who can crochet, but never felt I had the energy or drive to pick up a new hobby. Turns out I do! Today was day three of crocheting and I have already made some good practice pieces.

My first complete practice "project" thing.

It's nice and useful - it keeps me off my phone, and I do need to be doing something with my hands in order to focus. 

More aimless stitching.

So-called "granny squares" were harder to make. The cool thing about crocheting, though, is that you can just start over at any time. I started over a few times with my first granny squares. It felt good even to fail - it just meant I had more things to do with my hands! I'm sure I will be more perfectionist with my first big projects.

My first granny squares.

Unfortunately, I hate the texture of thickly knit and crocheted clothing, so I'll just be making a bunch of excess for a while. I think crocheting is one of those things that's not so useful now that we have mass-produced fabric, which is awful because it's so fucking addictive.

A rather sassier granny square.

1/23/2026 Whatever Was Going On With Cephalus and Procris

Skipped another day... hehe...

The story of Cephalus and Procris serves to remind us all that people didn't tell stories quite the same as they do now, because things just kind of happen. So Procris is of the house of Athens, the niece of Procne, who became the first nightingale, and Cephalus is a descendant of the King of the Winds and a hunter. The goddess Aurora falls in love with Cephalus and kidnaps him. He begs to be let go so he can be with his wife. Aurora assents but suggests Procris could have cheated on him. Cephalus goes back in disguise to test Procris's loyalty.

Zoom in on Cephalus' face. He does NOT fuck with Aurora!!!!

"He made passionate love to her, always reminding her, too, that her husband had forsaken her. Nevertheless for a long time he could not move her. To all his pleas she made the same answer, “I belong to him. Wherever he is I keep my love for him.” 

But one day when he was pouring out petitions, persuasions, promises, she hesitated. She did not give in; she only did not firmly oppose him, but that was enough for Cephalus." (272)

Not sure what Procris looks so happy about here.

 

He yells at her because he's a bitch. And she leaves and forsakes the company of men. Which was the right thing to do. Unfortunately she eventually forgives him, and many years later he accidentally kills her while they're hunting.  

So much happening there. So much to play with: Cephalus being flighty because he's a descendant of the winds - Aurora being so central to the plot and yet somehow not - Procris dying at the hands of her husband because men aren't shit - etc. 

Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre's opera Céphale et Procris, with a libretto by Joseph-François Duché de Vancy, is a little different. This version makes its moral slightly more obvious. Céphale and Procris are not married, but Aurora still wants to fuck the former, and tells Minerva to tell her priestess that Procris should marry some guy named Borée. Then she kidnaps Céphale. When she eventually lets him go, she sends a fury of jealousy upon Procris, who runs away and agrees to marry Borée. Then Céphale goes to fight Borée and kills Procris in the process. 

The beginning of the death scene of Céphale et Procris. Beautiful stuff...

I suppose I'm not feeling the blog feeling today. I hope this doesn't indicate a permanent burnout - I simply can't let another hobby die out - something has to stick. Something has to stick!

1/21/2026 Greek Mythology Time Again

When I was little, my main source of Greek mythology was Edith Hamilton's Mythology, which contained Greek, Roman, and Norse tales. The book is mostly comprised of retellings of Greco-Roman myths, with a hilariously small section for Norse myths at the back. I read it cover to cover when I was little. I especially loved the little love stories, such as that of Cupid and Psyche and of Pomona and Vertumnus.

The book is on archive.org now, thankfully, allowing me to relive my long, long mythology phase. 

"Greek mythology is largely made up of stories about gods and goddesses, but it must not be read as a kind of Greek Bible, an account of the Greek religion. According to the most modern idea, a real myth has nothing to do with religion. It is an explanation of something in nature; how, for instance, any and everything in the universe came into existence: men, animals, this or that tree or flower, the sun, the moon, the stars, storms, eruptions, earthquakes, all that is and all that happens... Myths are early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them. But there are many so-called myths which explain nothing at all... This fact is now generally accepted; and we do not have to try to find in every mythological heroine the moon or the dawn and in every hero's life a sun myth. The stories are early literature as well as early science." (19)

Hamilton makes a lot of claims in this introduction. Her rather xenophobic assertion that the Greeks were basically the first rational beings on the planet sets the tone for the time period. And although indeed one probably should not compare a compilation of miscellaneous stories to the Bible, which was claimed by scholars of the religion to be entirely true despite its contradictions, this paragraph kind of downplays that yeah, what we think of as Greek mythology was in no little part Greek religion. I'm no scholar, but I can probably tell you that the story of the founding of Athens was, at least officially, thought to be reality. Was everyone taking the story of Acis and Galatea to be fact? I don't know. But the gods were indeed worshiped!

Who knows. Again, I'm not a scholar. Hamilton does go on to address the evolution of Zeus as a worshiped god, and how his characterization evolved over time.

Looking again at the introduction, I'm remembering what Hamilton taught me about the Greek versus the Roman writers.

"Most of the books about the stories of classical mythology depend chiefly upon the Latin poet Ovid, who wrote during the reign of Augustus. Ovid is a compendium of mythology. No ancient writer can compare with him in this respect. He told almost all the stories and he told them at great length. Occasionally stories familiar to us through literature and art have come down to us only in his pages. In this book I have avoided using him as far as possible. Undoubtedly he was a good poet and a good storyteller and able to appreciate the myths enough to realize what excellent material they offered him; but he was really farther away from them in his point of view than we are today. They were sheer nonsense to him...

He says in effect to his reader, “Never mind how silly they are. I will dress them up so prettily for you that you will like them." And he does, often very prettily indeed, but in his hands the stories which were factual truth and solemn truth to the early Greek poets Hesiod and Pindar, and vehicles of deep religious truth to the Greek tragedians, become idle tales, sometimes witty and diverting, often sentimental and distressingly rhetorical. The Greek mythologists are not rhetoricians and are notably free from sentimentality." (21)

What an approach! Being born the same year as the death of Thomas Bulfinch, who retold even Greek myths with Latin names for the gods! Writing after all the operas and plays based on stories from Ovid! 

And it seriously biased me against the Romans. The Greek mythological revival of the 2010s did seem to ignore Rome as well, although I will always hold that my favorite love story of Cupid and Psyche is in fact originally Roman. (I did hear once it was based on an old Greek story, but I am not sure.)

"It was a simple matter to adopt the Greek gods because the Romans did not have definitely personified gods of their own. They were a people of deep religious feeling, but they had little imagination, They could never have created the Olympians, each a distinct, vivid personality. Their gods, before they took over from the Greeks, were vague, hardly more than a 'those that are above.'" (44)

Like hello? The shade?

Anyway, stay tuned for my opinion on some fucked-up myths, including Cephalus and Procris, subjects of the Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre opera "Cephale et Procris".

1/20/2026 Baroque Doyoungs

Spent all last night trying to get audio clips to work. Really hope it works tonight...

There is a part of "Dallas Love Field" by Kim Doyoung that sounds very baroque to me. For a while I thought I was a little insane because I could not find an example of this particular progression. But I have found something vaguely resembling it, and so now I will share my pattern recognition with the world. 

Doesn't the "dallilsurok sumchalsurok" part sound a little classical? Doesn't it have a little bit of that 17th century flair? Here is a clip from "Je suis aymé de celle que j'adore", an air by Michel Lambert. A bit of a resemblence, right? 

The successive leaps up of a fourth and down of a third on "Nos plaisirs sont d'autant" resemble the artistry of NCT's eldest rabbit. 

I have hastily transcribed the Doyoung splice.

"Dallas Love Field" takes a rather strange route with a modulation into B major. If we followed the pattern to the end it might look something like this.

Didn't really know how to finish this.

Literally all I had to say today. Hope everyone's doing well.

1/19/2026 How the Fuck Do You Embed Audio On Here

I am sick of it. Oh my god. Either you can't play the audio, or you CAN play the audio but the text fucking disappears. How do I do this. I was so excited about my post today and now I can't post it!!

Help me 

1/18/2026 Trouble Transitioning

I have expressed this online before, but I think people who shit on Tumblr or BlueSky while having Twitter accounts are absurd. You have a Twitter account. You have no excuse to have a Twitter account.

That being said, I joined Twitter with a private account in March of last year and am still on there. 

I cannot wean myself from it. I don't have the app - I use Firefox on my phone to access it - so there's no way to delete it in order to make it less accessible. I thought Blogger and Tumblr would make for good alternatives, but I don't have Blogger on my phone, and frankly, not much goes on on Tumblr. (I know for a fact it is not dead, though. Please get on Tumblr.)

My impulse to be on Twitter is the same as my impulse to be on Spotify, which I only got so I could track my listening stats with last.fm. I want to be in the know. I want to be able to interact with my friends, and - well - I want attention. I am no less performative than anyone else. I got an Instagram recently and am trying to balance sharing K-pop songs with Baroque arias so people know I'm multifaceted like that.

I should be smarter than all this. Anyone else feel like they should be smarter than this? Aren't we supposed to be better than those people who must constantly announce themselves by being funny, or witty, or morally superior? Shouldn't we be able to strong-arm ourselves into keeping from getting on our phones when we are uncomfortable in real life?

I do feel at times when I'm at an oppressively uncomfortable social gathering or event that the world must shrink down to just me and Twitter. These are times when I think I'm allowed to cope by watching my favorite K-pop boys dance in vertical concert videos. But, predictably, I remain miserable, hunched over with eyes straining to read.

Whatever. These kinds of posts are why I'm on Blogger and not Substack.

1/17/2026 Emergency Review of "Knife" by Enhypen

Yes... I skipped a day... I have failed already! I was going to finish this last night, but by then it was 2:30 in the morning, since I had spent so much time watching my first three episodes of House M.D. with my sister. I hated it. I hate that mean-spirited, evil show. But that's not the subject of this blog post.

I would say I'm avoiding the subject of House M.D. to preserve my own peace, as I have been prone to anger this week, and it hurts my head. But the subject on which I am about to comment, though not invoking in me the rage that House M.D. did in the midnight hours of the 16th and 17th, is certainly not a cheerful one, and it does not excite my heart so much as leave my head stuffy and aching.

So last night I got this video on my recommended page, which is strange because I don't listen to Enhypen.

 

I had seen a clip of this song before, used by a girl group stan to disparage the new trend for rage hip-hop in K-pop, attributed to CORTIS with their songs "GO" and "FaSHioN". I have to confess I'm not a fan of CORTIS either, not the least because I don't stream any group under HYBE for their explicit ties to Israel. (This is painful at times because one of my favorite groups, Seventeen, is under HYBE.)

And I do not like the rage hip-hop trend in K-pop - even though I think rage hip-hop is super fucking cool. It's just that the structure of the typical K-pop song, with chorus and verse kept strictly apart, does not seem to suit the dizzying intensity of the genre. One of the reasons "Fame" by RIIZE fell flat on its face was its insistence on also being a pop song, with subdued verses and a typical prechorus build-up. The chorus was passionate enough, if forgettable, but overall the group's talents did not suit the genre at all.

"Knife" is a pretty inoffensive song when you listen to the whole thing. For the first 20 seconds, though, it is laughable. The song begins with a silly little sample of this vine.

Could this sample have been effective in combining a playful tone with something more intense? In another life, maybe. Here it feels like an AI-generated parody of a K-pop song. ChatGPT, generate me an Enhypen song based off of this vine. If this song were entirely AI-generated I would not be surprised.

The verses are... fine. We have the nice little melody fragment that has to be repeated four times across two boys' voices; we have the brief prechorus melody alternated with awkward "nahs" and "mms", and then the goddamn chorus again, and perhaps we should stop trying to redo "FE!N". Let's give up. The average person listens to a song and appreciates it, while the small group of evil, evil people who compose songs to sell to K-pop companies listen to a song and immediately begin to brainstorm ways to make money off of it. 

I am not here to discuss the complicated political history of K-pop cultural appropriation, though. I am not nearly informed enough about that, nor can I claim expertise in rage hip-hop - although I listened to a few songs ("Miss the Rage" and "FE!N" included) for this post. I also returned to "Breathe" by boy group xikers.

Guys, I have to be real with you. I hate xikers. They have the Stray Kids problem of being clamorous without any real musical originality, and some of their voices I find straight-up unpleasant to listen to (although that is extremely subjective, and I'm sure they're nice boys). Plus, being from nine months ago, "Breathe" looks like an even more egregious "FE!N" ripoff than "Knife". But it has a little more life, more personality, more youth to it, making Enhypen sound tired and behind the times in comparison. I am even charmed by the tinny "nollan geoya hokshi?" before the chorus. Like, sure. If you're going to do this, at least make it funny.

I do not want to pretend that "Knife" is not somewhat powerful when listened to independently. If toy-like and absurd, the beat does have some kick to it. And mercifully the song ends after two minutes and twenty seconds. However, this song is a trend-killing, tired, limp failure. I know people who compose for Enhypen will never learn their lesson, but I hope groups that cannot afford to release a bad song will.

1/15/2026 Anglican Composers I Hate

When I first heard William Henry Harris's Magnificat in A, I was astounded at how much it fucking sucked. Rather, its structure was new to me at first. Then I gradually realized it fucking sucked. I have sung two Harris pieces and I have noticed the same awful aspects in both.

This is a blog post written out of rage and not proofread, so I expect to be embarrassed of it as soon as next week. I want to apologize to people who enjoy Anglican choral music. I am tempted to write off the whole genre, but it does include some Thomas Tallis and Handel (!!!), plus some interesting modern composers. There was just a period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when composers seem to have fucking sucked. 

Maybe it's just that I know the language they are writing in, and therefore can spot more keenly the parts where the music doesn't serve the text. Or maybe it's just because British composers have a propensity to suck. Probably a combination of both, and also that I have to sing these choral pieces. But I'm sure hearing the same Magnificat every other evensong must bare to an audience its weaknesses that the choristers hear so clearly! 

It's not just that the writing of these short pieces is monotonous, although that's certainly a big factor. The works just cannot make up for their winding structure with any particularly sweet or unique substance, and many choices made seem arbitrary and ridiculous. 

Things that English church composers of the 19th and 20th centuries love to write:

• Random solo lines for sopranos, SA, or TB
• Phrases that randomly cut off and then resume after a measure or two
• Hesitant mini-phrases followed by aimless organ interludes
• Random unison sections 
• Cadences that aren't fucking cadences

The last thing is the evilest thing about the Harris Magnificat. It goes from tonic to tonic. I to I. The middle voices descend just to jump right back to the same fucking chord. (Zero shade to the performers I reference here, by the way. This choir is very good.)

I'm starting to feel guilty about writing this because my animosity has faded a little since I started. Therefore I will end this here. I feel so alone in this position. If you also hate Anglican choral music, please let me know and I'll properly bitch about John Ireland. In the meantime, check out his Jubilate deo and Te deum and play bingo with the list above. 

1/14/2026 Bad Old Poems, and Marlowe

Sometimes I do wish sonnets Worked and were not such a risk. I've written some in the past few years and they have been great exercises - but they don't hold up so well. Today I will give you a glimpse of some Bad Blog Poetry.

So two or three years ago I wrote some fragments of a sonnet - the voice was of a wanderer who comes across some kind of singer and chills with him. Don't remember the way in which the singer uniquely is able to quell the wanderer's anxieties; that was probably going to be the meat of the poem, which I did not ever get to.

"Some time ago, I met a wandering man

(Moreso a nomad; “wandering” did not suit

A one so deep enamored of his plan

That never did he stray from this one route)."

Embarrassing. I have high standards for this kind of fantasy aesthetic, as it really is not my thing, so it was a real risk to write it. I do remember I was going to say "man" instead of "one" in line three, but it sounded disgusting because "man" rhymes with "plan".

Skipping four lines later -  

"So fond was I of him, I let him stay

About my fire, and on his dented lip

Put song that charmed me till an hour to day;

His voice so raw and clear—I have no quip

To give that would quite serve the way his cheeks

Assembled round his smile, nor serve his brow,

Relaxed upon his skin (he was not meek,

Pretending not an absent effort). Now

I spoke to him with burden lessened still

Against my pressing urge withal to speak,

Which, were the silence soft, as was my will,

Before our quiet comfort would prove weak—"

Not sure what "on his dented lip / Put song" was intended to mean - probably goaded him into singing? Don't like the use of the word "quip". I do think the twistiness of the last four lines is engaging, but even I'm having trouble figuring it out. I guess I meant the wanderer is more comfortable speaking now, but if the silence were "soft" (the singer not singing?) they would still feel comfortable not speaking. 

Lines that could perhaps be strong if tweaked. Hope the next line doesn't have the term "lack-a-day" in it!

"Yet—lack-a-day—his eyes averted so—"

Shit.

"Yet—lack-a-day—his eyes averted so

As to show them aflame with starshine bright

And so they took on tears; but now I know

The suff’ring there was played me by the light"

Here the first fragment ends. The syntax of the last line is kind of nonsensical, unless I meant "played" as in "shown" (???) - but even then I'm not sure the light is meant to be the subject.

I actually completed a sonnet on the myth of Hero and Leander the year before, and it's one I liked very, very much. I think it holds up better than this one. I've always loved mini tragic Greek and Roman love stories. In this one, Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite, lives on the opposite shore of the Hellespont from Leander, who swims across it every night to see her, guided by the flame of Hero's lighthouse. One night during a storm the light is blown out and Leander drowns. When Hero finds him washed up on the beach, she kills herself.

I had known the myth for a while, but by some chance I came to skim Christopher Marlowe's poem on the lovers and was fascinated. Many aspects of it are terribly rapey, and for no reason, too. Others are very sweet. I take it line by line. For example, this fragment, despite the situation involving loss of sexual agency, does have some charming imagery: 

"His hands he cast upon her like a snare:

She, overcome with shame and sallow fear,

Like chaste Diana when Actæon spied her,

Being suddenly betray'd, div'd down to hide her;

And, as her silver body downward went,

With both her hands she made the bed a tent,

And in her own mind thought herself secure,

O'ercast with dim and darksome coverture."

In some of the weakest lines of my poem I chose to infuse some references to masturbation and to mind-reading OCD. I realize that sounds insane.

"Now Hero puts a finger to her lips;

Her sacred shift she drapes on, and begins:

 

'Since through the dewy night I lie awake

For gentler causes than my shame, and fear,

Beneath my quilt I will a tent-pole make

And test your name where ghosts can never hear.'" 

I should probably edit that part.

My strongest lines also reference Marlowe, who ends his poem as such:

"Thus near the bed [Hero] blushing stood upright [...]

And right about the chamber [a] false morn

Brought forth the day before the day was born.

So Hero's ruddy cheek Hero betray'd,

And her all naked to his sight display'd [...]

By this, Apollo's golden harp began

To sound forth music to the ocean;

Which watchful Hesperus no sooner heard,

But he the bright Day-bearing car prepar'd,

And ran before as harbinger of light,

And with his flaring beams mock'd ugly Night,

Till she, o'ercome with anguish, shame, and rage,

Dang'd down to hell her loathsome carriage." 

How strange it is to end a love poem this way! The sexuality is in keeping with the rest of the work, but to end the whole thing with a witchlike description of the night is an interesting choice. 

Here's what I wrote:

"The lighthouse gleams, yet pale, in dawning heat;

The vapors of the sea rise dull and grim;

The ugly Sun puts darkness to retreat

And redly shifts the candle’s span to dim,

And whitely sets upon Leander’s hips

And dances on his tunic-hidden skin."

As ugly as Night in comparison to Marlowe, but I think it makes more sense to have the Day be despised, since that is when the lovers have to part.

Maybe I will edit the poem to my liking and post it one of these days. Thoughts?