The Great Girl of the Rose, Introduction

An experiment in narrative poetry.

I have occasionally posted fiction on this Substack, as part of my experiments to see if it is a viable platform for telling stories. Others on Substack have begun to make a stock-in-trade of storytelling, but I have hesitated to do anything truly serious, mostly because Substack as a platform did not seem to lend itself to the posting of the stories I wished to tell. In particular, Substack did not seem to be a a good home for poetry, and much of my storytelling is done in verse. I write narrative poetry as part of my work, and I didn’t think Substack would be a good home for it.

However, I have recently discovered Substack’s “poetry block” feature, which has changed things substantially. Now, at last, I seem to be able to post poetry on Substack. As a result, I’m going to start posting something over the next few weeks, something I have had in my back pocket for a while.

A Story in Verse

“The Great Girl of the Rose” is a narrative poem, consisting of about 2900 lines written in regular meter. It was written in the Spring and Summer of 2019. It is a story within a story; specifically, it is an episode, canonical or not, within the big story of Technocracy, which I have dreamed of as a major work for most of my adult life, and which I have finally begun to put down in text over the last three or so years. For a long time, I had no idea what to do with the poem. It is too long to find its way into a major poetry journal, yet as as work of verse I could never find a fit for it as a standalone book. So now, on my Substack, we are going to experiment. I am going to see what happens when I release this poem sections at a time, over the span of days and weeks and months. I shall promote it on social media, and we shall see what kind of response it gets from readers.

A Note on the Story

“The Great Girl of the Rose” is an episode within a larger story, a story I have prepared to tell over the course of most of my life. This story is Technocracy, a very big story indeed, one which had its origins in my last years of high school and has grown, changed, blossomed, and emerged in the more than fifteen years since. Technocracy is a very, very big story. And yet it is a small story as well. I think Dr. Johnson once remarked that some stories are big, and some stories are small. My hope is that Technocracy will be both: both large and small, encompassing both the highest heights of the universe as well as the deepest depths of the human heart.

So much goes on within this massive story. But in a brief summary: Technocracy is a tale of the far future, a science fiction story set thousands of years after our own time. It is a world ruled from the shadows by the titular Technocracy, a cabal of black-robed scientists wielding impossible levels of technology. Their technology is so powerful that it can even manipulate metaphysics, and from this mastery of reality they have generated four children, called the Elementals. There are two girls: Saera and Marin, and two boys: Ardo and Terry. They are called Elementals because each of them can manipulate one of the four classical elements: Air, Water, Fire, and Earth. Created by the Technocracy, the four of them have escaped its clutches, and now roam the world of the far future, always on the run. That is the most basic summary; the details are considerably larger.

It’s a very large story indeed, a story that contains stories. One such story within a story is “The Great Girl of the Rose,” though I confess I’m not sure it is still canon to the main story of Technocracy. You must understand, I wrote it before I began the first proper book of the story. Things changed between 2019 and 2020, and things which were not as settled in 2019 became settled over the course of writing the first book in 2020. One might consider “The Great Girl of the Rose” deuterocanonical, if one wants to view things that way. But it remains fully within the spirit of the larger story. I have no shame in it; it is a fine story in verse, and I am very proud of it for what it is.

A Note on the Meter

“The Great Girl of the Rose” is written in regular meter. Specifically, it is written in unrhymed couplets, consisting of one line of fourteen syllables followed by one line of thirteen syllables. The metrical feet involved are not always as clear as I would like; my tendency in writing poetry has always been to count syllables, rather than feet. The thirteen-syllable line is one of my own invention, and plays a very important role in the telling of Technocracy itself. In this poem, it forms a part of the couplet, the second part. The first part is formed by a line of fourteener, a long-established metrical line in English poetry. As a general rule, the first line, of fourteen syllables, ends with a soft, unstressed syllable; while the second line, of thirteen syllables, ends with a hard, stressed syllable.

My goal with this style of couplet was to try and imitate the appearance of flowers swaying in the spring breeze. Back and forth, back and forth. Flowers play a very important role in the story of the poem, so I wanted to incorporate them into the meter in some way.

Additionally, I was inspired by the opening movement of Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, with its great, swinging sound. Back and forth, back and forth:

In practice, it looks like this:

Shadows stretched, and red began to creep to the horizon,
Red, deep red, the sun so bloody as it chose to set.
All about the city there were candles lit in houses
And electric lights, so amber-gold, were turned to ‘on.’
So as the Republic of New York lost all its daylight,
As the night came, slowly draining sunshine from the world,
As the stars came one by one out in the sky above them,
All New York began to light itself with manmade glow.
From the towers and the districts with their crumbling brownstones,
From the ancient penthouses with gargoyles of stone,
From the craters lined with avenues and with tall houses,
Light, so gold, so amber, shone from every windowpane.
Light was shone upon the streets and lonely winding roadways,
Lights lit up the rivers and canals, the farmland’s grass,
Light was gleaming in the trains and cable cars progressing
Through the night, into the districts and the little towns.
Always onward spread the city, and its light spread likewise.
Soft and gentle amber, as the daylight went away.
So the light of nighttime fell upon the old republic,
Soft and amber, golden, as the day gave way to night.

We’ll see how well things work. All of this is still somewhat experimental for me. I shall do my best.

A Note on the Title

“The Great Girl of the Rose” is an accident of failed self-study. I was attempting to teach myself Latin back in the Spring of 2018. I was making my way through Wheelock’s Latin and learning the early chapters of vocabulary. Anyone who has learned Latin via Wheelock knows that the early chapters contain in their vocabulary puella, the word for “girl,” magna, the word for “great” or “large,” and rosa, the word for “rose.” I was idly trying to make a coherent sentence one day in another class, doodling in my notebook, and I attempted to write “the rose of the great girl.” However, I realized I had messed up my declensions, and what I had actually written was “the great girl of the rose.” I suddenly knew that was a fantastic collection of words, and I couldn’t let it go unused. It had to be the title of something. Thus the idea for the poem began.

Donations!

Like everything else on my Substack, “The Great Girl of the Rose” will be free. I have no intention of charging for reading it. However, if, as the poem goes along, you find yourself liking it so much you feel the urge to send me some money, I will happily oblige. You can send me money the following ways:

Patreon

Venmo: @Charles-Shoultz

CashApp: $CAShoultz

PayPal

The poem will be posted in sections, with a new section every Thursday. We start a week from today. Hopefully we’ll have a good time.