WEBVTT

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Well, the next
poem I want to read

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is one which is also
a poem about France

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and the way the poems are
ever about anything like that.

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But again, this
projection it's again

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a poem in the second person,
but it's addressed to a book.

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And part of its pretense is
that it's not a poem at all,

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it's not an original poem
but a translation, it's not.

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Though it takes suggestions
and phrases at the beginning

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and two or three places through
it from a poem by the French

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poet Agrippa d'Aubigné.

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The title of the poem is
"Envoy from d'Aubigné."

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And I can say something about
what the point of that is.

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D'Aubigné was a Protestant
poet at the end of the 16th

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and beginning of
the 17th century,

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who was a soldier and fought on
the Protestant side in the wars

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of the religion and was a
very important general under

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the French King.

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And when the French King
changed his religion,

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Agrippa d'Aubigné refused and
in the bitterness of the rest

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of his life retired to the
country and wrote this long,

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terrible poem about the wars of
the religion and the appalling

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suffering of France, which from
his point of view was something

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that was wasted.

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But I needn't say
on the outside of it

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what connection the
contemplation of what one

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regards as wasted military--

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the wasted suffering that
comes from military action

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would have to the 1960s,
what other connections that

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poem would have with
the ones around it

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is not anything that you need
to have to ponder at this point

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to hear the poem, I don't think.

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But at the beginning
of his long poem

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he wrote a preface
in verse, which

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in the formal and
traditional manner

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set the book out into the
wild world, and in his case

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it's one of the few
really personal things

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that he ever wrote,
because in doing

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so he regarded his own purpose
in everything that he'd done.

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And that's why, that's in the
sense in which the poem is

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indebted to him and why the
title is called "Envoy From

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d'Aubigné."

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Go book, go, now I will let you.

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I open the grave.

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Live.

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I will die for us both.

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Go but come again if you
can and feed me in prison.

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If they ask you why
you do not boast of me,

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tell them as they
have forgotten,

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truth habitually gives
birth in private.

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Go without ornament,
without showy garment.

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If there is in you any
joy may the good find it.

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For the others be a glass
broken in their mouths.

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Child, how will you survive
with nothing but your virtue

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to draw around you
when they shout

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"die, die" who have
been frightened before?

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The many.

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I think of all I
wrote in my time--

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Dew, and I am
standing in dry air.

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Here are what flowers there are,
and what hope from my years,

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and the fire I carried with me.

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Book, burn what will
not abide your light.

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When I consider
the old ambitions

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to be on many lips
meaning little there,

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it would be enough for me
to know who is writing this

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and sleep knowing it, far
from glory and its gibbets,

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and dream of those who
drank at the icy fountain

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and told the truth.

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