The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
Page 17
By now the luminous Roman text had really been brought down to earth. But in the next moment, in the next stanza, Horace came back in Latin with the miraculous precision of his verse. This alternation between the trivial and decrepit on the one hand and the buoyant and sublime on the other taught me a lot. It had to do with the conditions of poetry and of life. That through form something could be raised to another level. The caterpillar feet were gone, the wings unfolded. One should never lose hope!
Alas, Bocken never realized how captivated I was by those classical stanzas. To him I was a quietly provocative schoolboy whose incomprehensible nineteen-fortyish poems appeared in the school magazine—that was in the autumn of 1948. When he saw my efforts, with their consistent avoidance of capitals and punctuation marks, he reacted with indignation. I was to be identified as part of the advancing tide of barbarism. Such a person must be utterly immune to Horace.
His image of me was further tarnished after a medieval Latin lesson dealing with life in the thirteenth century. It was an overcast day; Bocken was in pain, and his rage was just waiting to explode. Suddenly he tossed out the question: who was “Erik the Lame Lisper”? Erik had been referred to in our text. I replied that he was the founder of Grönköping.** This was a reflex action on my part stemming from my wish to lighten the oppressive atmosphere. But Bocken was angry, not simply then and there but even at the end of term when I was given a “warning.” This was a brief written message home to the effect that the pupil had been negligent in the subject, in this case Latin. Since my grades for written work were all high, this “warning” presumably referred to life in general rather than to my performance in Latin.
In my last year at school our relationship improved. By the time I took my exams it was quite cordial.
Around then two Horatian stanza forms, the sapphic and the alcaic, began to find their way into my own writing. In the summer after matriculation I wrote two poems in sapphic stanzas. The one was “Ode to Thoreau,” later pruned down to “Five Stanzas to Thoreau,” the more juvenile parts having been erased. The other was “Storm,” in the sequence “Autumnal Archipelago.” But I don’t know if Bocken ever acquainted himself with these. Classical meters—how did I come to use them? The idea simply turned up. For I regarded Horace as a contemporary. He was like René Char, Oskar Loerke, or Einar Malm. The idea was so naïve it became sophisticated.
* In Britain the film was called Frenzy, and in the USA, Torment.
† Poet and journalist (b. 1932).
‡ “Tranan”: the crane (the bird).
** The archetypal small town. According to the satirical weekly Grönköpings Veckoblad the town was founded by King Erik Eriksson (1216–1250), known as Erik the Lame Lisper.