For Gerald Kelly
In 1918 W.B. Yeats published
a set of metaphysical essays
on the nature of being and art:
PER AMICA SILENTIA DE LUNAE.
The first sentence of one of the essays
reads as follows: ‘We make out of the quarrel
with others, rhetoric, but of
the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’.
***
The school I attended had been founded
by Henry VIII – or, rather, his fixer,
Thomas Cromwell – from some of the riches
acquired through the Reformation of the Church
and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Such schools were focussed on the training of clerks,
and their medium of instruction was Latin.
Some centuries later the Latin set text
we studied was Book II of Virgil’s AENEID,
in which the Greeks emerge from the wooden horse
to ravage the sleeping city of Troy
‘per amica silentia de lunae’,
in the friendly silence of the moon.
***
Despite the title the essays make no mention
of the ten-year siege of Troy or its fall.
Perhaps the title was to please his patroness,
Lady Gregory, another with
mystical leanings – for, like her, Yeats
believed in the divinity of the moon.
The Prologue to the essays was written
in May 1917. Yeats writes
of walking with a friend the summer before
in Calvados, Normandy, and how
the ideas in the essays were forming then.
Curious that a poet who could write
about ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’
makes no mention in prose of the young men
dead and dying on the Western Front
a couple of hundred miles away.
‘…out of our quarrels…’
By David Selzer