The bitter scholar remembers how his monographs
disappeared down a chute in the middle of his days,
how he stuttered at the interview when questioned about admin.,
how his rivals pounced on his fresh book and munched it.
The sky darkened steadily since his undergraduate years
when he sparkled like a diamond at the café table
outside which there was an orchard with ripening apple trees.
Was it his life that infected his studies
and drew his energies away from his papers.
Was it his shyness that made him fall silent
among the coteries in the Dining Hall.
Was it that everything had already been written about his favourite
author.
Did he not know seamanship well enough to understand Conrad.
Then he withdrew. And the apple-bottomed students
were moving eagerly towards fresher voices
which combined witticisms with transatlantic power.
Who could be said betrayed him? Some sinuous Judas
hiding among the trees, among the blossoms.
Let him remember his early days before his office was denuded,
before the scholars ceased to consult him,
before timidity overwhelmed him in the eternal silence,
when literature used to reflect his youthful optimism
and the leaves of the trees were the leaves of precious poems
before literature itself, allied to power and place,
became the plaything of men agile with word processors,
before idealism drained away from his heart
on a battleground which he had never thought existed
in a world which he loved once in that early café
whose owner could talk knowledgeably about Proust.