better than this
brodsky is terribly hard to hold up in english. like our flag he demands never to touch the ground but like any cloth he sags and taunts you right when your hands are most full of him. (the flag metaphor is a good one: all those stars & stripes.)
Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot
I.
He died in January, in the beginning of the year.
Beneath the streetlight stood the frost at the entrance.
Nature did not have time to show
him the chorus of her beauties.
The windowpane grew narrower from snow.
Beneath the streetlight stood the herald of bitter cold.
At crosswalks puddles froze.
And he locked the door with the chain of years.
The inhertance of days, in its bankruptcy, does not reproach
the family of Muses. For all her orphanhood,
poetry is founded on the resemblance
to far-running monotonous days.
Having splashed in the pupil and dissolved in the lymph,
she is barely akin to the Aeolian nymph,
like our friend Narcissus. But in the calendar rhyme
she is another, certainly, more clearly.
Without evil grimaces, without evil thinking,
from all the bounties of the Great Catalogue
death chooses not the amenities of style,
but invariably the singer himself.
She does not need fields or copses,
the sea in all its splendid luster.
She is generous, in the short section
of the heart that she has allowed herself to hoard.
In vacant lots already the pine trees blaze,
and the splinters have cleared out behind the threshold,
and the angels have settled on the shelf.
A Catholic, he lived until Christmas.
But, like the sea in a noisy hour of flood,
having splashed at the breakwater, fairly
backwards he absorbed the waves-hastily
he exited his own triumph.
No longer God, but only Time, Time
calls him. And a younger generation
of vast waves exalts the burden of his impulse
on the very edge of the blossoming fringe-
lightly exalts and, yearning, thrashes
on the edge of the earth. Forces are mocked in abundance.
And in January his bay juts out
into that dryland of days where we are left.
Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot
I.
He died in January, in the beginning of the year.
Beneath the streetlight stood the frost at the entrance.
Nature did not have time to show
him the chorus of her beauties.
The windowpane grew narrower from snow.
Beneath the streetlight stood the herald of bitter cold.
At crosswalks puddles froze.
And he locked the door with the chain of years.
The inhertance of days, in its bankruptcy, does not reproach
the family of Muses. For all her orphanhood,
poetry is founded on the resemblance
to far-running monotonous days.
Having splashed in the pupil and dissolved in the lymph,
she is barely akin to the Aeolian nymph,
like our friend Narcissus. But in the calendar rhyme
she is another, certainly, more clearly.
Without evil grimaces, without evil thinking,
from all the bounties of the Great Catalogue
death chooses not the amenities of style,
but invariably the singer himself.
She does not need fields or copses,
the sea in all its splendid luster.
She is generous, in the short section
of the heart that she has allowed herself to hoard.
In vacant lots already the pine trees blaze,
and the splinters have cleared out behind the threshold,
and the angels have settled on the shelf.
A Catholic, he lived until Christmas.
But, like the sea in a noisy hour of flood,
having splashed at the breakwater, fairly
backwards he absorbed the waves-hastily
he exited his own triumph.
No longer God, but only Time, Time
calls him. And a younger generation
of vast waves exalts the burden of his impulse
on the very edge of the blossoming fringe-
lightly exalts and, yearning, thrashes
on the edge of the earth. Forces are mocked in abundance.
And in January his bay juts out
into that dryland of days where we are left.