Final Victory Poem by Dennis Ryan

January 31,2004; revised Monday morning, January 28,2019 at 11: 10 a.m.

"Know then that the world exists for you.For you is the phenomenon perfect."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"

"I'd do them no dishonor... but defy the city?I have no strength for that."
- Sophocles, Antigone
Can final victory be discerned in a final dispute
between sisters at a palace altar, followed by one
being buried alivebecause she demands honor
for the body of her fallen, deceased brother?
I hear no echo of this final dispute, no record
of this death in the speeches of the great lecturer
who declared final victory: "The kingdom of man
over nature, which cometh not with observation..."
"The kingdom of man" is an abomination, a fabrication.
Our incompleteness is enough to desire completeness,
renders us humble. I would allow a defeated daughter
to plead my case, for I amflawed, failed, passionate.
"Wonders are brought to our door".The chorus of wise
elders happen by following hard upon the sisters' dispute.

Listen, as they come: "But now for Victory! Glorious
in the morning, joy in her eyes..." And the king:
"My countrymen, the ship of state is safe.The gods—"
Stopped, not yet at mid-sentence, and twenty-three centuries
later an agonizing, antinomian confession from the lecturer:
"A transforming greatness seems very near, yet I am haunted
by a sense of incapacity... Life is a strange alternation of
contradictory states; I am all in all to myself, but I am nothing
I ought to be."From such deep contradiction and complication,
from that downwardmost, inwardmost, most intense moment
of understanding, Emerson finally realized that final victory
is elusive, that "Nature" is a power not to be taken for granted.