NOTES:
Roughly speaking, Blank Iambic Septameter (Fourteen syllables per line, stresses on even -numbered ones, no rhymes. Some places obviously I add an unstressed syllable at the end of a line, or fail to put one at the beginning. Some incidental and weak rhymes.)

If you don't know the story of Actaeon, you really ought to read a competent storyteller's rendition of it. It's more than a frivolous just-so story. The Greek world and its tension between its heroic men and wise women is a clash of cultures and a synthesis of virtues, a well far, far deeper than most imagine. Our civilization is still drinking from it, though at times I'm afraid the well will dry up.

Regardless, Actaeon and his disastrous confrontation with Artemis has always fired my imagination-- he's a figure much like Parzifal-- a young fool who fails to open his heart to the wonderment of the sacred. So like Parzifal, I've given him a second chance. "Troth of Actaeon" then would really be a very final chapter in a much longer "Actaead," comperable to the Odyssey.

Here, obviously both the goddess and the hero are anthropomorphic deer-- that's another reason I like the story-- of course the deer was Artemis' animal, and Actaeon was transformed into one.

See Also:
Answer the Whirlwind
Testament of Drum-Talker (Story)
Drum-talker's Song
Legend of the Lunataur
Other poetry:
Vera
Fuzzy Wuzzy Furthling
Answer the Whirlwind
A Poetic Form
Dragon Unforgiven
Familiar and Your Own, or Strange and Sweet
Summer and Fall: Seasons of the Hart.
Rhiannon
Furry Sonnet 130
Immiscible
Definition