In Lieu of an Introduction

. . . he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who in their turn were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus . . . the knowledge that here and there the truth lay buried . . . and was to rise again in some distant age . . . —this knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to generation.

—Thomas De Quincey, “Walking Stewart”

Livius Andronicus: An Odyssey is peregrinatory, and an Iliad, no doubt, genocidal, but an Idyssey is gestational as regards idiosyncrasy--or oddness.

Dr Johnson: Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.

Mrs Thatcher: There is no such thing as a womb with a view.

Ben Jonson: By G—, ’tis good, and if you like’t, you may!

—Petrus Tornarius, Imaginary Conversations

Whisper, immortal Muse . . .

The Dream of Human Life (artist unknown, ca. 1533). National Gallery, London.

“Better a quiet life, the moon in a bucket of water

With nobody there to hear though the stars do

And a bedside book like the teachings of Chuang Tzu” —Derek Mahon, “The World of J. G. Farrell”

I once had a glass or two of wine with J. G. Farrell

(I know it’s dropping names, but what the hell!)

The best novelist you’ve probably never heard of.

“Who would you like to meet in London?” my friend and agent Lavinia (not Lavinia Greacen)* said

(she meant, of course, in London’s literary world).

There on a visit from California, I hesitated, and she suggested Jim.

Later, alas, he was swept from a rock fishing by the sea in Ireland and drowned.

I can't recall what we talked about—

it was forty-four years ago.

Now I’ve come across this poem by Derek Mahon,

The best poet of whom you’ve probably never heard!

Whisper, immortal Muse . . .

*Lavinia Graecen, J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer (London: Bloomsbury, 1999).

Green Helmet

Isobel Lilian Gloag, The Knight and the Mermaid, or The Kiss of the Enchantress (ca. 1890), detail

I keep wanting to say things in sorrow

Even when I've got nothing to say;

What best might be spoken tomorrow

I recklessly utter today.

“When I was young,

I had not given a penny for a song

Did not the poet sing it with such airs

That one believed he had a sword upstairs;

Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,

Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish,”

Yeats says.*

That’s wishful thinking—

You should quote these lines winking!

I, too, would have my helmet green

If poetry could scour it clean.

*”All Things Can Tempt Me,” in The Green Helmet (1910)