Two Poems by Donald Davie
PN Review 1, Volume 4 Number 1, October - December 1977
MANDELSTAM, ON DANTE
1
Russian Jew, for you
To re-think Dante, dissolve
Into fluids that four-square slab
Of Christendom, meant a resolve
(So it must seem) to taunt
And tempt the unsteadied Gentile,
As it might be me, to act
In nettled Stalin's style.
Dangerous, these corrosives
You handle. First and last
Powder the graven image!
'Jew' means 'iconoclast'.
Can we believe the impulse
Consciously suicidal?
Or was the play of mind
Lordly, the interest idle?
2
About the skies, you went wrong somewhere. Let
Some nearer neighbour of theirs make the corrections.
For them it was easier, them the nine Olympic
Dantescan discuses, to clang directions!
You are not to be thought of apart from the life you lived.
And what Life intends is at once to kill and caress
That thus the distress which beat in on your ears, on your eyes
And the sockets of your eyes, be Florentine.
Let us not then assign to you, no, let us not fit about your
Hollowed-out temples that bittersweet prickle, the laurel-,
Better in your case if we should split your
Heart into blue and clamorous bits of ocean.
For when you died, having served out your time,
You in your time friend to all lifetime-livers,
Yes, there transpired a broader, a loftier chime
Sent from the skies in your entire chest's heavings.
3 (Voronezh, March 1937)
'About the skies, I went wrong somewhere. Let
Some nearer neighbour of theirs make the corrections.
For you it was easier, you the nine Olympic
Dantescan discuses, to clang directions,
Be out of breath, get black and blue contusions ...
But Thou, if Thou art not the heretofore's
Nothing-accomplishing hero, if Thou art bent
Standing over me now, wine-steward, to proffer the cup,
Pour me the strong wine, not the ephemeral ferment
To drink of, to pledge the vertiginous, towering, straight-up
Insane blue-azure's hand-to-hand engagement.
Dovecotes, black holes, starlings' nesting-boxes,
Blue of the bluest, case of the key at its keenest,
Ice of the heretofore, high ice!-ice of the Spring . . .
Clouds, look-the clouds, against soft collusions embattled . . .
Quiet now! Storm-clouds, see where they lead them out, bridled.'
4
Rhyme, you once said, only
Points it up, tags it, the blue
Cabinet-making of Heaven
And Earth, the elegant joints
All of them flush as given!
Symmetries in this blue
Cabinet, the small
Rooms of stanzas-in this
No woe, you said, but the happy
Chances of mathematics.
Clouds come and go like a French
Polisher's breath on walnut,
Protean, fluid ... And you
A lordly squandering playboy!
No bequest but you blue it!
At home in the Empyrean . . .
Yes, but one joint had sprung
Long, long ago. The woe
Came, and was Florentine?
As well say: Galilean.
GRUDGING RESPECT
As when a ruined face
Lifted among those crowding
For the young squire's largesse
Perceives him recognize
Her and she grabs, not for any
Languidly lofted penny
They scrabble for, but for his eyes
And pockets them, their clouding
That instant; and the abruptness
With which his obliging is checked,
His suddenly leaving the place . . .
Just so may a grudging respect
Be, from a despised one,
Not just better than none
At all, but sweeter than any.
Born in Barnsley in 1922, Donald Davie served in the Navy and studied at Cambridge, becoming Professor of English at Essex, and later at Stanford and Vanderbilt. In 1988 he returned to England where he died in 1995. Carcanet's uniform Collected Works of Donald Davie includes Collected Poems (1990), Under Briggflatts (1989), Slavic Excursions (1990), Studies in Ezra Pound (1991), Older Masters (1992), Church, Chapel, and the Unitarian Conspiracy (1995) and Poems and Melodramas (1996). Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy (one volume) are also available from Carcanet.