Status Updates From Collected poems, 1931-1974

Somewhat disappointing. Purposefully oblique. Here we writes for a very small minority of readers.

‘A Patch of Dust’

Second stanza:

‘It doesn’t matter: in the silent night
Fragrant with the death of so many friends, poets,
The major darkness comes and art beckons
With its quiet seething of the writer’s mind.’

‘Certain Landfalls’: ‘No, she did not like the place at all.’

‘The Muses’: I like this.

The drum spoken of in ‘Sage’ reminds me of the drums the rhapsodes would use to keep time in their recitations.

The last few poems before ‘Sage’ seem to speak to a fruitless, voracious hunger to understand love and sex. ‘They tried like later you and me / To find one beauty without sophistry’ (‘The Grey Penitents’). ‘Raising once more those vaulting hopes / You soon proved counterfeit.’ And finally in ‘Sage’: ‘To pierce behind the mask, for evermore / Match passion and clarity—that hopeless task.’

‘A Farewell’: this poem evoked memories from me of once when I said farewell for the last time to someone.

‘On the Suchness of the Old Boy’

Stanza three:

‘It was was another way of saying
That he had discovered the heraldic law
Namely, that while someone somewhere
Weeps and tears his hair with his claws
In some other spot someone is laughing:
And both from the same damn cause.’

‘Vaumort’: a lover in a graveyard.

‘Vega’: Travel to north Italy after a long sojourn in Greece or some such clime.

‘Seferis’ is an elegy to Giorgos Seferis, who had died a year before the poem was written.

‘Seferis’ is an elegy to Giorgos Seferis, who had died a year before the poem was written.

‘Last Heard of’:

‘I have been washed up here or there,
A somewhere soon becoming an empty everywhere.
My memory of memories goes far astray,
Was it today, or was it yesterday?’

I like this whole poem.

In ‘Last Heard of’, Durrell mentions the Brahmaputra river, somewhere alongside which he was born.

‘Envoi’

‘Be silent, old frog.
Let God compound the issue as he must,
And dog eat dog
Unto the final desecration of man’s dust.
The just will be devoured by the unjust.’

‘Poetry among other afflictions
Is the purest selfishness.’

‘Incognito’: ‘All winter now I shall lie suffocating / Under the débris of this thought.’

In ‘Joss’, mentions India and Greece: ‘A second childhood, born again in Greece.’

Having read ‘One Place’: is Durrell thinking more on death now?

In ‘Faust’:

‘Then, after, with death forfeited,
To melt upon the silence of the tongue,
A Margaret or a second Helen,
Half-dreaded hauntress of the waking dream.’

Margaret is a woman that Faust seduces with the help of Mephistopheles, and Helen of Troy is conjured up to convince Faust to continue with the pact when he relents.

‘Rain, Rain, Go to Spain’: thinking on the postcard of a departed love.

‘The Reckoning’: striving to live a life of a greater being, living chaste and straitened, eventually reckoning with the limits of existence and being, seeing things as they are, in contrast to what is ‘above’.

‘To convince at last that all is possible,
That the feeble human finite must belong
Within the starred circumference of wonder,
And walking alone at night so suddenly
Realise how careful one must be with hate—
For you become what you hate too much,
As when you love too much you fraction
By insolence the fine delight …

‘It is not meaning that we need but sight.’

I really like this poem.