Remembering the 'Thirties •
Hearing one saga, we enact the next.
We please our elders when we sit enthralled ; But then they're puzzled ; and at last they're vexed To have their youth so avidly recalled.
It dawns upon the veterans after all That what for them were agonies, for us Are.high-brow thrillers, though historical ; And all their feats quite strictly fabulous.
This novel written fifteen years ago Set in my boyhood and my boyhood home, These poems about " abandoned workings," show Worlds more remote than Ithaca or Rome.
The Anschluss, Guernica—all the names At which those poets thrilled or were afraid For me mean schools and schoolmasters and games ; And 'in the process someone is betrayed.
Ourselves perhaps. The Devil for a joke Might carve his own initials on our desk, And yet we'd miss the point because he spoke An idiom .loo dated, Audenesque.
Ralegh's Guiana also killed his son. A pretty pickle if we came to see The tallest story really packed a gun, The Telemachiad an Odyssey.
DONALD DAVIE.
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