On First Looking into... «Selected Poems of Lawrence Durrell»
robot24 августа 2015On First Looking into Loeb's Horace I found your Horace with the writing in it; Out of time and context came upon This lover of vines and slave to quietness, Walking like a figure of smoke here, musing Among his high and lovely Tuscan pines.
All the small-holder's ambitions, the yield Of wine-bearing grape, pruning and drainage Laid out by laws, almost like the austere Shell of his verses — a pattern of Latin thrift; Waiting so patiently in a library for Autumn and drying of the apples; The betraying hour-glass and its deathward drift.
Surely the hard blue winterset Must have conveyed a message to him — The premonitions that the garden heard Shrunk in its shirt of hair beneath the stars, How rude and feeble a tenant was the self , An Empire, the body with its members dying — And unwhistling now the vanished Roman bird?
The fruit-trees dropping apples; he counted them; The soft bounding fruit on leafy terraces, And turned to the consoling winter rooms Where, facing south, began the great prayer, With his reed laid upon the margins Of the dead, his stainless authors, Upright, severe on an uncomfortable chair.
Here, where your clear hand marked up "The hatred cypress" I added "Because it grew On tombs, revealed his fear of autumn and the urns", Depicting a solitary at an upper window Revising metaphors for the winter sea: "O Dark head of storm-tossed curls"; or silently Watching the North Star which like a fever burns Away the envy and neglect of the common, Shining on this terrace, lifting up in recreation The sad heart of Horace who must have seen it only As a metaphor for the self and its perfection — A burning heart quite constant in its station.
Easy to be patient in the summer, The light running like fishes among the leaves, Easy in August with its cones of blue Sky uninvaded from the north; but winter With its bareness pared his words to points Like stars, leaving them pure but few.
He will not know how we discerned him, disregarding The pose of sufficiency, the landed man, Found a suffering limb on the great Latin tree Whose roots live in the barbarian grammar we Use, yet based in him, his mason's tongue; Describing clearly a bachelor, sedentary, With a fond weakness for bronze-age conversation, Disguising a sense of failure in a hatred for the young,
Who built in the Sabine hills this forgery Of completeness, an orchard with a view of Rome; Who studiously developed his sense of death Till it was all around him, walking at the circus, At the baths, playing dominoes in a shop — The escape from self-knowledge with its tragic Imperatives: Seek, suffer, endure. The Roman In him feared the Law and told him where to stop.
So perfect a disguise for one who had Exhausted death in art — yet, who could guess. You would discern the liar by a line, The suffering hidden under gentleness And add upon the flyleaf in your tall Clear hand: "Fat, human and unloved, And held from loving by a sort of wall, Laid down his books and lovers one by one, Indifference and success had crowned them all."
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