[Dichtung]

Lawrence Durrell
On 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."

His great achievement in this vein is "On First Looking into Loeb's Horace". This is a poem of a highly original order. The title immediately suggests a postmodern reordering of Keats's famous sonnet, but Durrell is more conscientious than most poets who play with the retreading of past masterpieces. It is a love poem into which is folded an indirect narrative and an excellent example of literary criticism. Critical assessment is always more attractive written in the form's own medium - this is, verse itself. The poet finds a copy of the Loeb Edition crib of Horace's poetry annotated by a former lover's hand. Reading along with her comments he analyses the Roman poet's life and work. Not only has the love affair perished, but its loss is matched by the vanished Mediterranean civilization which nurtured Horace and still inspires today's readers of Latin literature.
(c) Peter Porter