Poems and translations

Chapter 14: ON AN ANNIVERSARY

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About This Book

The collection gathers lyric and ballad-like poems that portray rural landscapes, local speech, and vivid characters through dark humor, elegy, and plainspoken lyricism; many pieces are concise narratives or monologues about love, death, loss, and social life, while others register mythic or meditative moods. A substantial section offers translations and adaptations from Petrarch, Villon, Leopardi, and medieval lyricists, varying between literal and free renderings. A prefatory essay frames the poet's interest in mixing exalted feeling with the material of ordinary life. The sequence balances songful rhythms with austere images and an abrupt, colloquial voice.

ON AN ANNIVERSARY

After reading the dates in a book of Lyrics.

With Fifteen-ninety or Sixteen-sixteen

We end Cervantes, Marot, Nashe or Green:

Then Sixteen-thirteen till two score and nine,

Is Crashaw’s niche, that honey-lipped divine.

And so when all my little work is done

They’ll say I came in Eighteen-seventy-one,

And died in Dublin.... What year will they write

For my poor passage to the stall of night?