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Nov. 11th, 2010 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionBloom's Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems was pretty great. Not perfect - I'm not sure what anyone gets out of the conclusion of Sigurd the Volsung in isolation, for example. He admits to freely choosing among 1) a poet's actual last work, 2) their work best confronting the end of life, 3) their most central statement. Which is a good idea, though essentially making for three overlapping anthologies in one volume. I guess in Morris' case this was all that came to mind? As usual the proofreading and editing kind of sucked, as usual everything Bloom said was just right and you'd have missed all of it yourself in twenty reading lifetimes.
A few of the selections really got to me - Spenser's "Prothalamion" and Ammons' "In View of the Fact" came out of the Rereading Emotional Lottery quite well, tear-inducingly for the latter. "One More Brevity" was rather moving too, and will be useful if I ever pick up my thesis again.
I'd never read Jean Garrigue's "Grief Was to Go Out, Away," Aiken's "Tetelestai" (HOW did I miss this?) or Robert Fitzgerald's "Souls Lake" before, and all were beyond wonderful. "Souls Lake" puts much better something I tried to:
The evergreen shadow and the pale magnolia
Stripping slowly to the air of May
Stood still in the night of the honey trees.
At rest above a star pool with my friends,
Beside that grove most fit for elegies,
I made my phrase to out-enchant the night.
The epithalamion, the hush were due,
For I had fasted and gone blind to see
What night might be beyond our passages;
Those stars so chevalier in fearful heaven
Could not but lay their steel aside and come
With a grave glitter into my low room.
Vague though the population of the earth
Lay stretched and dry below the cypresses,
It was not round-about but in my night,
Bone of my bone, as an old man would say;
And all its stone weighed my mortality;
The pool would be my body and my eyes,
The air my garment and material
Whereof that wateriness and mirror lived -
The colorable, meek and limpid world.
Though I had sworn my element alien
To the pure mind of night, the cold princes,
Behold them there, and both worlds were the same.
The heart's planet seemed not so lonely then,
Seeing what kind it found in that reclining.
And ah, though sweet the catch of your chorales,
I heard no singing there among my friends;
But still were the great waves, the lions shining,
And infinite still the discourse of the night.
A few of the selections really got to me - Spenser's "Prothalamion" and Ammons' "In View of the Fact" came out of the Rereading Emotional Lottery quite well, tear-inducingly for the latter. "One More Brevity" was rather moving too, and will be useful if I ever pick up my thesis again.
I'd never read Jean Garrigue's "Grief Was to Go Out, Away," Aiken's "Tetelestai" (HOW did I miss this?) or Robert Fitzgerald's "Souls Lake" before, and all were beyond wonderful. "Souls Lake" puts much better something I tried to:
The evergreen shadow and the pale magnolia
Stripping slowly to the air of May
Stood still in the night of the honey trees.
At rest above a star pool with my friends,
Beside that grove most fit for elegies,
I made my phrase to out-enchant the night.
The epithalamion, the hush were due,
For I had fasted and gone blind to see
What night might be beyond our passages;
Those stars so chevalier in fearful heaven
Could not but lay their steel aside and come
With a grave glitter into my low room.
Vague though the population of the earth
Lay stretched and dry below the cypresses,
It was not round-about but in my night,
Bone of my bone, as an old man would say;
And all its stone weighed my mortality;
The pool would be my body and my eyes,
The air my garment and material
Whereof that wateriness and mirror lived -
The colorable, meek and limpid world.
Though I had sworn my element alien
To the pure mind of night, the cold princes,
Behold them there, and both worlds were the same.
The heart's planet seemed not so lonely then,
Seeing what kind it found in that reclining.
And ah, though sweet the catch of your chorales,
I heard no singing there among my friends;
But still were the great waves, the lions shining,
And infinite still the discourse of the night.
