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Collected Poems
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Rolfe Humphries
54 books6 followersGeorge Rolfe Humphries was a poet, translator, and teacher.
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December 5, 2021
Rolfe Humphries was the Hemingway of the Amherst College I attended, the writer and football player, the man who wrote and did. He taught my freshman Humanities section, including his own translation of the Aeneid, where he made impersonal critiques: "The translator has here taken liberties..." I recall his liberties on "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis..." (I fear the Greeks and [their] bearing gifts) RH has it, "I fear the Greeks, even when bearing gifts."(33) Laocoön says this, summing his warning just before throwing his spear. Humphries loaned me his Loeb Seneca off his shelf, from which I read Thyestes, have felt ever since that Latin II should include Seneca's plays, not Caesar, put there to justify Latin to British schoolboys at Eton, before the military.
Humphries' poems are graced with lyric ease; he has imbibed the classical meters--Alcaics, anyone? or hexameters, Elegaics (next para). Forty-six pages here published in the New Yorker, not to mention dozens in other status magazines: Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, etc. He writes unfretted, unworried. Can this be said of WB Yeats' compact tetrameters, like "Whether a man die in his bed,/ Or the rifle knock him dead, / A brief parting from those dear / Is the worst man has to fear." Here's Humphries, a stanza "Fragment, Restored--from a single line of Housman": "Drink the medicine of dawn,/ Start again, be fit to bear / Yoke and collar, goad and care--/These are sure, and trouble thrives" (56). The mere fact that Humphries may be exhibited in proximity to Yeats shows his achievement.
Humphries' myriad translations rank him as the Dryden of the late Twentieth Century. Well, he and A MacLeish* together, AM as the public spokesman side of Dryden, Humphries as the great translator side. And this volume includes three Millay sonnets translated into light Latin elegaics (a la Ovid's Amores and Ars Amatoria). Many Welsh topics and names, and occasional poetic techniques, people. In "Green Armor on Green Ground" he explores the twenty-four official meters of Welsh verse. "For My Ancestors" begins, "Wales, which I have never seen,/ Is gloomy, mountainous, and green./...The people there rejoice in sorrow...Mostly, however, they go in / More for remorsefulness than sin/...They hate the English with good reason/..However grim their life, and hard,/ One thing they dearly love, a bard/...This is the one redeeming grace/ That saves them for the human race."
I feel decadent in my travels throughout Wales, from Dylan Thomas's Laugharne to St David's Cathedral, in that dry town, to the River Dyfi and Dolgelynen Farm, to the Holyhead Ferry and Denbigh, Snowdonia and Llandudno. And I still don't know any Welsh, though I read five other languages. I do know how Shakespeare represents Welsh speech in Fluellen's "Alexander the Pig" for Alexander the Great.
In a letter to me, RH wrote, "Now, for the fall term only, I'm Visiting Prof of Classics at Dartmouth, a course in Catullus, and one not unlike Humanities at Amherst, only more reading and worse students." In Jan I espect to retire, my wife giving up her medical practice in Amherst, and moving to CA with me. We've sold our Amherst home and have a little home in the foothills not far from Stanford." he then commented on my senior honors thesis (47 pp), "The topic of sound can stand a good deal of looking into. At S....(?) I heard a very good talk on sound of E (?) poetry, by an Irish Regius Professor." Later, on a postcard of Dartmouth's Hopkins Center for the Arts: "Sorry to be so slow replying to your of 11/11 [his, 12/13/66]. One more day here, after a vacation in the Virgin Islands, then retirement move to California. This 'cultural' (unquote) center is an ugly and I think a phony place. Your poems, certainly Eliot-influenced, nevertheless were interesting and showed considerable idiosyncratic you. Read Shakespeare's Songs."
When he was ill in California, his doctor Donald Smith posted some of his witticisms in the Dartmouth alumni magazine, including this superior limerck; when RH was asked if he coud pass gas from a newly made colon,
" A horrible huckster called Healy
Broke wind through his membrum virile.
When they asked him “But why?”
He replied, “Surely I
Have the right to express myself freely."
(My thanks to Laura Aquino of GdRds)
* I was blessed to follow Humphries's class with a poetry class directed by Archibald MacLeish, who later praised my full-year postdoc paper on lunar mapping (Riccioli named Sea of Tranquillity, "Mare Tranquillitatis" in 1651). I put his praise on the cover of my "Worlds of Giordano Bruno, " "Your essay is better than academic. It leaves me feeling learned and grateful."
PS Add my gratitude to Welsh actors, led by Simon Winkler, who performed at the Bridewell Theatre, 4 April14, my version of Giordano Bruno's "Candelaio." See Youtube, "Candelaio Final Edit" for a couple scenes, very amusing after my intro. Half the actors and actresses were part Welsh, including (Gareth) Ryan Davies, Rhys Meredith, and Elunod Hawkins. Feyi Babalola was born in Nigeria, the rest English: Jilly Breeze, the Director Phillipa Waller, and the Producer Tom Bruno Magdich, part Italian, without whom it would never have been performed.
Humphries' poems are graced with lyric ease; he has imbibed the classical meters--Alcaics, anyone? or hexameters, Elegaics (next para). Forty-six pages here published in the New Yorker, not to mention dozens in other status magazines: Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, etc. He writes unfretted, unworried. Can this be said of WB Yeats' compact tetrameters, like "Whether a man die in his bed,/ Or the rifle knock him dead, / A brief parting from those dear / Is the worst man has to fear." Here's Humphries, a stanza "Fragment, Restored--from a single line of Housman": "Drink the medicine of dawn,/ Start again, be fit to bear / Yoke and collar, goad and care--/These are sure, and trouble thrives" (56). The mere fact that Humphries may be exhibited in proximity to Yeats shows his achievement.
Humphries' myriad translations rank him as the Dryden of the late Twentieth Century. Well, he and A MacLeish* together, AM as the public spokesman side of Dryden, Humphries as the great translator side. And this volume includes three Millay sonnets translated into light Latin elegaics (a la Ovid's Amores and Ars Amatoria). Many Welsh topics and names, and occasional poetic techniques, people. In "Green Armor on Green Ground" he explores the twenty-four official meters of Welsh verse. "For My Ancestors" begins, "Wales, which I have never seen,/ Is gloomy, mountainous, and green./...The people there rejoice in sorrow...Mostly, however, they go in / More for remorsefulness than sin/...They hate the English with good reason/..However grim their life, and hard,/ One thing they dearly love, a bard/...This is the one redeeming grace/ That saves them for the human race."
I feel decadent in my travels throughout Wales, from Dylan Thomas's Laugharne to St David's Cathedral, in that dry town, to the River Dyfi and Dolgelynen Farm, to the Holyhead Ferry and Denbigh, Snowdonia and Llandudno. And I still don't know any Welsh, though I read five other languages. I do know how Shakespeare represents Welsh speech in Fluellen's "Alexander the Pig" for Alexander the Great.
In a letter to me, RH wrote, "Now, for the fall term only, I'm Visiting Prof of Classics at Dartmouth, a course in Catullus, and one not unlike Humanities at Amherst, only more reading and worse students." In Jan I espect to retire, my wife giving up her medical practice in Amherst, and moving to CA with me. We've sold our Amherst home and have a little home in the foothills not far from Stanford." he then commented on my senior honors thesis (47 pp), "The topic of sound can stand a good deal of looking into. At S....(?) I heard a very good talk on sound of E (?) poetry, by an Irish Regius Professor." Later, on a postcard of Dartmouth's Hopkins Center for the Arts: "Sorry to be so slow replying to your of 11/11 [his, 12/13/66]. One more day here, after a vacation in the Virgin Islands, then retirement move to California. This 'cultural' (unquote) center is an ugly and I think a phony place. Your poems, certainly Eliot-influenced, nevertheless were interesting and showed considerable idiosyncratic you. Read Shakespeare's Songs."
When he was ill in California, his doctor Donald Smith posted some of his witticisms in the Dartmouth alumni magazine, including this superior limerck; when RH was asked if he coud pass gas from a newly made colon,
" A horrible huckster called Healy
Broke wind through his membrum virile.
When they asked him “But why?”
He replied, “Surely I
Have the right to express myself freely."
(My thanks to Laura Aquino of GdRds)
* I was blessed to follow Humphries's class with a poetry class directed by Archibald MacLeish, who later praised my full-year postdoc paper on lunar mapping (Riccioli named Sea of Tranquillity, "Mare Tranquillitatis" in 1651). I put his praise on the cover of my "Worlds of Giordano Bruno, " "Your essay is better than academic. It leaves me feeling learned and grateful."
PS Add my gratitude to Welsh actors, led by Simon Winkler, who performed at the Bridewell Theatre, 4 April14, my version of Giordano Bruno's "Candelaio." See Youtube, "Candelaio Final Edit" for a couple scenes, very amusing after my intro. Half the actors and actresses were part Welsh, including (Gareth) Ryan Davies, Rhys Meredith, and Elunod Hawkins. Feyi Babalola was born in Nigeria, the rest English: Jilly Breeze, the Director Phillipa Waller, and the Producer Tom Bruno Magdich, part Italian, without whom it would never have been performed.
Displaying 1 of 1 review