The 99 Poem Challenge (Fox-Trot-9) ✓

99. Epic -- The Flying Dutchman (Introduction)

The 99 Poem Challenge
Fox-Trot-9

99. Epic — The Flying Dutchman
Introduction

Epics. Before I begin, let me tell you about epics. The word, epic, has come down to us as a noun and an adjective. For the noun, it means a long narrative poem about the adventures of a heroic figure, but that's only for those few who care to actually read one. For the rest of us, epic is an adjective that denotes grandeur and scope, like whenever someone says, 'Damn, that's so freakin' epic,' or more commonly found in those who greatly dislike something, 'Epic FAIL!'

Well, I remember when I was just twelve years old the very first epic I came across. It wasn't even a poem, actually; it was an epic two-part miniseries called The Odyssey, starring the Armand Assante as Odysseus and Greta Scacchi as Penelope. In a word, it freaking blew me away; Armand Assante was amazing! Everyone in that film was amazing, and I highly recommend everyone to see it. Anyway, I was so inspired by that film that I began my first attempt at an epic poem; and trust me, it wasn't pretty. I thought knew how to write (at least for a twelve-year-old), so when I did some half-assed research into it, I decided to write my own epic the only way I knew how—in rhyming couplets. But don't think it was awesome, because it's not; looking back on it now, I had no clue of meter or real rhyme beyond the fact that two words have the same sounds at the end of each line or even any real idea of how epics go. In a word, it was horrible. I think I spent two nights writing it, and then I gave it up. It was just too damn difficult for me, and I ended up with a 200-line eyesore of a poem about a sea voyage taken on by a crazy crew for no apparent reason other than the fact that I wanted to emulate the stuff I saw on the film.

Well, that was my first epic experience (no pun intended). The second epic I came across—and this was the first real epic poem I ever read—was Paradise Lost by John Milton. I was fourteen that time, and let me tell you, up the that point it was the most ambitious story I dared to read; even today Paradise Lost remains one of the most ambitious stories I ever read, right up there with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra and James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. John Milton's use of blank verse is in-freaking-credible! When I read it, I was like ( O_O ) with my mouth gaping in shock. It took me about two months to read the whole thing, and when I finished with the last line of that poem twelve long books later, I was breathing hard and sweating, my heart was pounding, and my hands were trembling! And you wanna know something else? In the few weeks after I finished reading that poem, I found my sentences getting longer and longer and reversing my syntax; it took a while to cut them down to size and get it back in the right order.

I have since read other epics, like Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy—the Inferno part, at least—, Homer's Odyssey and John Keats' Hyperion, all the while thinking about that epic failure I wrote five years ago. I think it's about time I invoked the muses to help me write a better version of it, this time regarding one of my all-time favorite legends, the Flying Dutchman. Now conceivably an epic can be written in any of the other forms found in this challenge, but for my purpose here, I'll take a page out of John Milton's book and write mine in blank verse, so I won't have to deal with all that rhyming hassle. And just so it won't sound too monotonous, I'll take a few liberties with the blank verse scheme. And since I'm a suspense junkie, I'll put as much suspense as poetically possible into it. You'll see what I mean, trust me. ( ^_^ )

(To be continued...)

A/N: An epic (from the Ancient Greek adjective (epikos), which comes from (epos) "word, story, poem") is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form. Nonetheless, epics have been written down at least since the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, and John Milton. Many probably would not have survived if not written down. The first epics are known as primary, or original, epics. One such epic is the Old English story Beowulf. Epics that attempt to imitate these like Milton's Paradise Lost are known as literary, or secondary, epics.

Meter: Iambic pentameter
Rhyme: Blank verse