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Ancient Love

2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 124; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.2016.0050

1934-421X

David Middleton,

Classical Antiquity Studies

Ancient Love David Middleton (bio) Before and After Sleep Late afternoon. Then twilight. Then the nightWhen nightmare-sleep and sleeplessness contend.No Lethe-drop to drink. A heart not rightWith what the mind alone would comprehend: The first and final question: where we goAnd where we come from, why we sojourn here,The Big Bang and Big Rip the bounds we knowAround these flat-earth plains of mere and sheer. Yet from some prime elusive shadow-seed—Its physics welling in the seen-unseen—Unfold proportions noble in their breed,The Golden Numbers and the Golden Mean: The spiraling florets of flower heads,The curve of shell and beak, of horn and claw,The whirling squares a logarithm spreadsThrough everything by Fibonacci’s law, Or Pegasus, whom Ptolemy could traceIn radiant matrices—the fountain’s sheen!—Descending star by star through time and spaceTill hooves struck rock and freed the Hippocrene. [End Page 276] 4 a.m. —in memory of Philip Larkin That was the time you’d claimAnd make your ownWhen dreaming fails and leavesUs each alone, No star-crossed lovers lostIn sex and sweatOr Hector braced for dawnWith archers set Or Lear upon the heathRaging but this:An old man in the darkGroping toward a piss. Schemes of Life I have resolved … till I am afraid to resolve again —Samuel Johnson, 1761 Another evening wasted in the mistOf self-deception, sloth, his new-made listOf good intentions numbered, ranked, and pinnedOn that blank wall where good intentions end: To go to church well-rested, meek and blithe,Not late for prelude, hymn, or with his tithe;To bid farewell to beefsteaks—fatty, rare—For tofu cakes, bean sprouts, or bleaker fare;To banish wine and spirits, even aleFor teas that leave him sober, bored, and pale; [End Page 277] To write the late great poem of great old age,Pure beauty, truth, and goodness page by page. Yet when, like all the rest, this scheme of lifeMeets the resistant will in final strife,Succumbing to a dark that’s always here,He’ll face the day hung over with his fear,Abstracted by inaction, on the brink,The waters of oblivion his drink. Of As and Is Sheer moonlight strains through panes to touch a wordWhose printed letters fix it on a pageWhere images like singing things emergeToward things whose silence cries out to be heard. In crimson ink the poet dips his penAnd hears a red tongue flickering in the leaves,A mocking voice now forked in simile,Its “ye shall be as gods” for god-like men. And near those trees of knowledge and of lifeIn whose shade Adam rose to name his dreamA third tree grew whose branches, roots, and stemsWould split and spread in Babel’s after-strife. Yet here so far from Gihon we recallIn lunar noon’s reflections some faint traceWhen as lay still and quiet within the isAnd Eve in Eden sang before the Fall. And here we still draw deep from Isaac’s wellsReopened in those names his father gaveFor quarrel and no-quarrel in whose stavesIdentity with likeness ever dwells. [End Page 278] Infinitives in memory of H. J. Sachs do it for ancient love —Gloucester to the Old Man in King Lear most modern English usage guides have dropped the objections to the split infinitive —Wikipedia You never tired of telling us againThat story when, in 1932,Hearing the atom had been split at last,You slowly walked the English building’s hallsDreading a bomb’s apocalypse to come,Then glimpsed as you passed an open classroom doorA colleague lecturing freshmen on the splitInfinitive, still going by the book,An old-guard battle-ax grammarianOn separating particle and verb. Years later, in the sixties’ Sturm und DrangWe read through Lear with you as wandering guide,Chain-smoking Kents, injecting politics,And we, like Kent, attentive to a king,Some of us on the front row with a lightAnd...