Well I'll conclude then just with a poem
which is really about writing.
It really completes this full circle.
Of course, I wrote it after the death of Louis MacNeice.
And it's really about writing undergraduate poems,
remembering when Louis MacNeice and I and Auden were together,
and we showed each other undergraduate poems.
And it's called "One More New Botched Beginning."
And it's about how a lot of people who might have
remembered.
"Their voices heard, I stumble suddenly,
choking in undergrowth.
I am torn, mouth pressed against the thorns,
remembering 10 years ago.
Here in Geneva, I walked with Merleau-Ponty by the lake.
Upon his face, I saw his intellect.
Energy of the sun interweaving waves, electric, danced on him.
His eyes smiled with their gay logic through black coins
flung down from leaves.
He who was Merleau-Ponty that day
is no more irrevocable than the I that day who was beside him.
I am still living.
Also that summer, my son stayed up the valley in the mountains.
One day I went to see him, and he stood, not
seeing me, watching some hens.
Doing so, he was absorbed in their wire netted world.
He danced on one leg.
Leaning forward, he became a bird boy.
I am there, still seeing him.
To him, that moment, and self knowing even then,
is drowned in the oblivious earliness.
Such pasts are not diminished distances,
perspective vanishing points, but doors burst open suddenly
by gusts that seek to blow the heart out.
Today, I see three undergraduates standing
talking in a college quad.
They show each other poems.
Louis MacNeice, Bernard Spencer, and I. Louis
caught cold in the rain.
Bernard fell from a train door.
Their lives are now those poems that were pointers to the poems
to be their lives.
We read there in the college quad.
Each poem is still a new beginning.
If they had been finished, though, they
would have died before they died.
Being alive is when each moment's a new start,
with past and future shuffled between fingers for a new game.
I am dealing out my hand to them,
one more new botched beginning here where we still
stand talking in the quad."
Thank you.