Meters

I. THE HEROIC COUPLET

 

I loved, when I was young, the hard, sedate,
controlled iambics, the foot-soldier gait
that swung great armies to their epic goal,
or, slowed, allowed a meditative stroll.
The rhymes might seem, when so exactly struck,
one gate after another shut and stuck;
and yet recurrence reassured, the chime
of an old clock securely keeping time.
And so the strict form gave the fifteen-year-old
(timid and venturesome, withdrawn and bold,
guideless and guileless in the realms of thought)
the steady, stable structure that she sought.
In adolescent tides of fear and hope,
I prized the canny certainties of Pope;
when all I did seemed wrong, it was delight
to hear him say, Whatever is, is right.
With later strength I’d plunge and breast the flow
and heady surge of Shelley and Hugo,
but first I learned to walk with firm intent
the steadfast paths of the Enlightenment.
And in old age, as strength again grows faint,
that poetry of order, wit, restraint,
braces my soul; I honor the clear art,
and let the heroic measure pace my heart.

 

II. INGENTI PERCUSSUS AMORE

 

And yet forever unfaithful, eternally restless, hard upon eighty,
I sit like the schoolgirl I once was over my Latin lesson,
so that I can read, no, not read, can listen, straining, intense,
to catch a whisper, a breath of the incredible music, the ancient,
remote song, hear the soft voice with its faint country accent
telling how shepherds quarrel for love, how from a chunk of the
    wood
you can grow a whole olive-tree, how the gods harry a good man.
Are you my last poet then, Vergil? last of so many I followed?
None sweeter, none better, never so truthful a guide on the way
that leads into darkness, passing the great tree that shelters
false dreams in clusters like bats under its leaves, to the river
of shadows, and the dim fields where hurt souls gather in silence.

 

You carried Dante up out of his hell; he turned away from you.
I would ask only to stay with you. You and Lucretius before you
showed me the shores where the foam of the breakers is starlight.

Now let me follow

you down, as falling leaves follow the west wind to rest in the earth.