by Richard Sanger

The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece! wrote Byron some time before a mosquito bit him at Missolonghi and he succumbed to malaria, age 36. Though I have certainly loitered on the shores of the wine-dark Med, I wanted to write a poem about some other islands that for me are equally rich in mythic power (as well as mosquitoes). Also I was turning 36. Why not imagine myself as the dying Byron among the pines and pink granite of the Georgian Bay? I didn’t want to bemoan the passing of my youth as Byron frequently did ("We’ll go no more a-roving" etc.)—I just wanted to evoke a moment at the end of the day, which might also be the end of all one’s days. (Incidentally, I suspect Byron protested a bit too much—when he said "my days of love are over", he was perhaps really saying "come on, just try and prove me wrong"). Of course—apart from my joy at scooping Greg Gatenby--bringing Byron to Canada had a special appeal: his qualities of verve and style, his high and breezy manner, so often go missing on the portage here.

So: I was turning 36, I was writing a poem, I wanted to have fun. I used a stanza form from Elizabeth Bishop’s wonderful poem "The Moose", one which I had used before in a poem called "In the Bodega" in Shadow Cabinet: six lines to a stanza, six syllables (or three stresses) to a line, a bit of rhyme straying in and out, like Hart Crane’s "somewhere violin"--at one point, line 3 "mud" and line 30 "blood" were close enough to rhyme properly. I also wanted "Wish" to be six stanzas long, and end on its 36th line—so the last line could refer to the poem as well as the poet. Given these constraints, it’s perhaps not surprising it took me a long time to finish the poem. I had the idea, yes, when I was thirty-five but for a long time it was just that, an idea. It didn’t really take off till later (on a transatlantic flight of all things) and then probably went through five or six drafts, perhaps ten. I remember finishing it: I was lying in a hammock in a backyard in Niagara-on-the-Lake, imagining Byron, mosquitoes, the Georgian Bay and the way the setting sun can throb in the sky there like a big red sore, like a mean sting. Oh, and I was 37. But don’t tell anyone.