The Great Girl of the Rose got an interesting reception. Some people read it, some people didn’t. Some people were put off by the intricate meter of the unrhymed couplets, which I do apologize for; it was originally written as an experiment, after all. But I received more love and more support than average—certainly more than one might expect for narrative poetry in this day and age. So, buoyed by the results of my last narrative poem, I think it is time to share another.
A Free Verse Story
A Winter Tale was written earlier than The Great Girl of the Rose; I wrote it in the autumn and winter of 2018 and 2019, while The Great Girl of the Rose was begun the following spring. As its name suggests, unlike the soft warmth and bright flowers of that latter poem, A Winter Tale takes place amid the snow and chill of the coldest, darkest season.
Also unlike that other poem, A Winter Tale is not written in regular meter. In fact, it is written in free verse; it was yet another experiment on my part, to see if I could take free verse poetry and craft a compelling story with it. This should, perhaps, make it easier reading. But it came with its own challenges in the writing. Robert Frost once remarked that free verse poetry is “like playing tennis without a net.” You can do it, but it’s immeasurably harder to keep things poetic. Free verse is always in danger of turning into mere prose. Just prose with line breaks. The trick is to avoid doing that. My biggest inspiration in writing free verse is another American poet: Wallace Stevens, perhaps my favorite of all the American poets. Stevens’ free verse poetry still manages to have the swing, the beat, the rhythm, of an actual poem. I tried to do the same with the narrative verse of A Winter Tale. I shall leave it to my readers to judge how well I succeeded.
A Note on the Story
A Winter Tale returns us to the world of Technocracy, my enormous science fiction story set in the far future. A very Christian story, too, though not always overtly so. A story told in both prose and verse, and A Winter Tale is an example of the latter. Like The Great Girl of the Rose, it is also of dubious relation to the larger story. I wrote this and all the big Technocracy poems before I started work on the main story proper, and some things about various details and elements of characters and settings have changed a little. So I am not sure how “canon” A Winter Tale is, to the broader story of Technocracy. The characters are largely still themselves, though, and the poem is close enough to the overall thrust of the bigger work. Close enough that I feel comfortable releasing it out into the world.
Despite being written earlier, I suspect that A Winter Tale takes place later in the overall story than The Great Girl of the Rose. In the latter poem, Saera, Marin, Ardo, and Terry are all about 15; in A Winter Tale I suspect they are closer to 17. Older, more grizzled, more weary and wary—if such things can ever be said of teenagers. More guarded, more fearful, more worn down from years of pursuit by the Technocracy, years of escaping the Stalkers in the nick of time. The unease is there, and the desperate search for hope amid the bleakness is present also.
Speaking of suspicions, I also suspect that this story takes place somewhere in North America. I never specified the location of the city where the story takes place; we are thousands of years in the future, and much about the world has changed. But I’ve always had a sense that this story takes place in land that once belonged to the United States; probably out in the West, given the closeness of the mountains and the density of the snow. But this is all speculation. I was never clear about just where the city is; I didn’t need to be. Being clear is not required for the poem to be what it is.
As in The Great Girl of the Rose, the two other major factions in Technocracy make appearances as well: the Royal Order of the Seraphim, and the Technocracy itself. In particular, we will see vastly more of the Technocracy in this poem than we did in The Great Girl of the Rose. In that poem their presence was largely felt only at the end; but here we will see a bigger glimpse of their power and splendor. And we will get to know Father Arius of the High Technocrats. Arius is the man who created the Elementals, and the Seraphim; he is the main villain of the overall story, such as there is one.
A Note on the Name
Despite the closeness of their names, A Winter Tale has almost nothing in common with Shakespeare’s late play The Winter’s Tale. The poem has the title it does for a very straightforward reason: it is a tale that takes place in winter, with the cold and the snow prominent elements of the setting of each part. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s play has the title it does for reasons less obvious to us today. As Wikipedia handily points out:
A play called "The Winter's Tale" would immediately indicate to contemporary audiences that the work would present an "idle tale", an old wives' tale not intended to be realistic and offering the promise of a happy ending. The title may have been inspired by George Peele's play The Old Wives' Tale of 1590, in which a storyteller tells "a merry winter's tale" of a missing daughter.[9][10] Early in The Winter's Tale, the royal heir, Mamillius, warns that "a sad tale's best for winter".[11] His mother is soon put on trial for treason and adultery – and his death is announced seconds after she is shown to have been faithful and Leontes's accusations unfounded.
If anything, A Winter Tale bears the strongest resemblence to another Shakespeare play: Romeo and Juliet, with its noble family drama, starcrossed lovers, and (spoiler alert) unhappy ending. Then again, given Mamillius’ remark that “a sad tale’s best for winter,” maybe there’s a link between the two “winter tales” after all.
Oh: there is one, single direct reference to Shakespeare’s play in the poem. I couldn’t resist. A character’s name, or the name by which they choose to be called. You should notice it when it appears.
Donations, Yet Again
Nobody took me up on the offer to donate money during the release of The Great Girl of the Rose. I can’t say I’m surprised; if you say that giving money for a story is optional, it’s natural that everyone will pick the option to give nothing. Nonetheless, I will repeat my statement from the first poem: if you are enjoying the work and feel compelled to show your appreciation with cash, you can send it to me the following ways:
Venmo: @Charles-Shoultz
CashApp: $CAShoultz
As with The Great Girl of the Rose, I shall be posting A Winter Tale in parts. This time around I think we’ll get a new part every Tuesday. We’ll begin the poem next Tuesday, a week from today—on the Winter Solstice. That seems the most appropriate date to begin a wintry story. Hopefully we’ll have a good time.