autumn journal ix

7/30/2019 Autumn Journal IX

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In Sicilian quarries, and many by the spear and arrow

And many more who told their lies too late

Caught in the eternal factions and reactions

Of the city state.

And free speech shivered on the pikes of Macedonia

And later on the swords of Rome

And Athens became a mere unversity city

And the goddess born of the foam

Became the kept hetaera, heroine of Menander,

And the philosopher narrowed his focus, confined

His efforts to putting his own soul in order

And keeping a quiet mind.

And for a thousand years they went on talking,

Making such apt remarks,

A race no longer of heroes but of professors

And crooked business men and secretaries and clerks

Who turned out dapper little elegaic verses

On the ironies of fate, the transience of all

Affections, carefully shunning an over-statement

But working the dying fall.

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it

Page by page

To train the mind or even to point a moral

For the present age:

Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,

The golden mean between opposing ills

Though there were exceptions of course but only

exceptions-

The bloody Bacchanals on the Thracian hills.

So the humanist in his room with Jacobean panels

Chewing his pipe and looking on a lazy quad

Chops the Ancient World to turn a sermon

To the greater glory of God.

But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;


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These dead are dead

And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas

I think instead

Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,

The careless athletes and the fancy boys,

The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics

And the Agora and the noise

Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women

pouring

Libations over graves

And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta

and lastly

I think of the slaves.

And how one can imagine oneself among them

I do not know;

It was all so unimaginably different

And all so long ago.

autumn journal ix

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