Well, the next poem I want to read
is one which is also a poem about France
and the way the poems are ever about anything like that.
But again, this projection it's again
a poem in the second person, but it's addressed to a book.
And part of its pretense is that it's not a poem at all,
it's not an original poem but a translation, it's not.
Though it takes suggestions and phrases at the beginning
and two or three places through it from a poem by the French
poet Agrippa d'Aubigné.
The title of the poem is "Envoy from d'Aubigné."
And I can say something about what the point of that is.
D'Aubigné was a Protestant poet at the end of the 16th
and beginning of the 17th century,
who was a soldier and fought on the Protestant side in the wars
of the religion and was a very important general under
the French King.
And when the French King changed his religion,
Agrippa d'Aubigné refused and in the bitterness of the rest
of his life retired to the country and wrote this long,
terrible poem about the wars of the religion and the appalling
suffering of France, which from his point of view was something
that was wasted.
But I needn't say on the outside of it
what connection the contemplation of what one
regards as wasted military--
the wasted suffering that comes from military action
would have to the 1960s, what other connections that
poem would have with the ones around it
is not anything that you need to have to ponder at this point
to hear the poem, I don't think.
But at the beginning of his long poem
he wrote a preface in verse, which
in the formal and traditional manner
set the book out into the wild world, and in his case
it's one of the few really personal things
that he ever wrote, because in doing
so he regarded his own purpose in everything that he'd done.
And that's why, that's in the sense in which the poem is
indebted to him and why the title is called "Envoy From
d'Aubigné."
Go book, go, now I will let you.
I open the grave.
Live.
I will die for us both.
Go but come again if you can and feed me in prison.
If they ask you why you do not boast of me,
tell them as they have forgotten,
truth habitually gives birth in private.
Go without ornament, without showy garment.
If there is in you any joy may the good find it.
For the others be a glass broken in their mouths.
Child, how will you survive with nothing but your virtue
to draw around you when they shout
"die, die" who have been frightened before?
The many.
I think of all I wrote in my time--
Dew, and I am standing in dry air.
Here are what flowers there are, and what hope from my years,
and the fire I carried with me.
Book, burn what will not abide your light.
When I consider the old ambitions
to be on many lips meaning little there,
it would be enough for me to know who is writing this
and sleep knowing it, far from glory and its gibbets,
and dream of those who drank at the icy fountain
and told the truth.