Stage Fright

“Art is a thing that is too big and too heavy for a single life, and even those who have reached a ripe old age are only beginners.”

—Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salome, August 11, 1903

Art’s too much for a single life,

René proclaimed when twenty-eight—

youth is wasted on the young,

as GBS* and/or Oscar say;

narrow the way and strait the gate

leading to life a few shall find;

wide to destruction the freeway

flows; many are for it designed.†

This is in art especially true,

which cuts its teeth on wordy strife.

Strive not so wild to make it new,

as Ezra did—it pained his wife

(and René, too—perplexing Lou).

Now I’ve attained a ripe old age,

I feel that perhaps I’ve won a stage.

Remnants of the Bastille on Boulevard Henri VI in Paris

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

*GBS = George Bernard Shaw.

† Matthew 7:13-14 (KJV):

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Curfew

Que voulez-vous la porte était gardée—Paul Éluard, « Couvre-feu » (1942)

I

What matters it if the gate be guarded

By curfew sheltering stammered cant,

I fashion this from remembered lingo,

It's words that fleet for cover in my mind,

Dislodged from their long familiar places,

Like old friends leaving their shadows behind,

Forgotten words that hide for a moment,

Then pop up again to show their faces

Unbidden, from the blind to which they went.

Those friends are gone, alas, for good. They’re dead.

II

What matters it if the gate be guarded,

Where curfew conceals vocabulary?

I fashion this poem from words recalled,

Though others flit for cover through my mind,

Absent from their long familiar places

Like old friends leaving their shadow behind.

Words forgotten scarper—I admit it—

But then show up, with dutiful faces,

Unbidden, from the blind to which they’d fled.

Those friends are gone for good, they're beastly dead.

Petra, Mytilene (Lesbos), 1966: Peter Rorich, Rab Shiell, Alexander Marais du Toit, and Michael von Lilienstein Tapscott, with the writer, PRD, on the right, the sole survivor of this group today. Photo by John Berryman.

Needless to say, Paul Éluard wrote of an entirely different sort of curfew in his famous poem, which inspired a generation in France.

Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Dwell not too much on that which no one knows!

Lines riffing on "Denk nicht zuviel von dem was keiner weiss!" by Stefan George, in Der Stern des Bundes ("The Star of the Covenant") (1914)

Dwell not too much on that which no one knows!

Life's pictured sense is inexplicable.

The wild swan shot and in the courtyard kept

Awhile, nursing a useless crippled wing,

Evoked—you said—some related thing:

Old kin of yours, or long-forgotten pet.

No fudged ressentiment or gratitude

For your care it ever showed. . . The end came

Quickly, and its fading eye rebuked

That last intrusion in the thingly game.

Envoi

Thingly's a term of art.

Res ipsa loquitur.

The poet tethered to the cart,

God only knows what may occur!

Cover image: Jan Asselijn, The Threatened Swan (De bedreigde zwaan), oil on canvas (1650), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Sunday, April 13, 2025