Poetic Inspiration
Have a browse throught his area of the site to explore how more modern poetry has focused on the sun as a symbol of both power and beauty. In the 18th-century ‘Wrack of the Apistos’, for example, we see the destructive force of nature in the form of the shipwreck of the Apistos (a great vessel bearing great wealth) which, the writer believes, was done in Mithras’s (a Roman sun god) name. Playing upon themes of hubris and the well-known myth of Icarus, poetry concerning the sun as a destructive force which inflicts humility upon figures of arrogance spans many centuries. The sun’s dangerously attractive qualities are hinted at by the 17th-century sonnet that describes the Roman freedman Amotan’s treasures as ‘celestial orbs’, which are then doused by ‘covetous Neptune’.
However, I cannot help but love those poems which also draw on the sun’s warming aspects. Make sure you cast your eye over ‘Winter Sunrise’, in which the author uses tumbling, rolling language to enliven his poem and absorb the reader. Enjoy!