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Virgil

LONGING AND DUTY

We visited the Vatican the first week

of January so there was only

a short queue for the Sistine Chapel,

and few visitors, once inside, to distract

from possibly Rome’s most famous work of art;

its gaudy magnificence; its lavish

genius; its conspicuous wealth; its

indulgent humanness; its celebration

of beauty, of flesh, and immortality.

 

Michelangelo, painter, architect,

sculptor and poet, spent months on his back

creating The Last Judgement on the ceiling –

a graphic history of prophesy.

One of the polymath’s sonnets ends:

‘…love makes perfect our friends here on earth

but death makes them more so in heaven’.

 

We left the Vatican via the Library

with its seventy thousand volumes.

There was an exhibition of illustrated

manuscript versions of Virgil’s works –

possibly the city’s most famous poet –

each much more than a millennium old,

fragments saved during the papacy’s

many epochs of acquisitiveness.

 

One illustration depicts Dido,

Queen of Carthage, on her funeral pyre.

She had been jilted by Aeneas, who left

to do his god-given duty to found Rome.

She killed herself with her ex-lover’s sword.

The poet has Aeneas – who had carried,

on his back,  his own aged father from Troy’s

burning ruins – watch the funeral pyre’s

receding flames as he sailed, almost due north,

across what would become Mare Nostrum.

 

 

SOME CORNER OF A FOREIGN FIELD

‘”…you…will not enjoy their coming. War, fierce war,
I see: and the Tiber foaming with much blood…”‘
The Sybil from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 6, lines 86–88

 

We found the grave by chance – stopping in Warwick
on our journey south. What drew us in
always beckons: the sad purposefulness,
the dark evergreens – towering larch, spruce, pine –
old graves, their lettering past pollution
almost erased, askew with ivy, moss,
lichen, the shadows of stories, echoes –
‘In Memory of Hannah Louise,
beloved wife of John Freeman, died
aged 21, April 1919
and Irene Louise, died aged 5 months,
December 1918′ – echoes, stories…

Although he died in 1998,
his is a military headstone, a
war grave marker – with John Enoch Powell,
his dates, his army rank, his offices.
Behind his stone, facing his back, as it were,
are ten genuine second world war graves,
paraded five by five: two Germans, a Pole,
an Italian, the rest British including
a woman – driver, stoker, able seaman,
sapper, engineer, assorted squaddies.
He was buried in his Brigadier’s
uniform, the Warwickshires’ emblem,
an antelope, carved in the Portland stone.
On the grave is a bunch of plastic flowers
and a handwritten note in Ancient Greek.

A Brummie, born next to a railway cutting,
he was a truly renaissance man: poet,
scholar, classicist, polyglot, soldier,
orator, equestrian, politician,
contrarian, tribalist, bigot.

He suffered survivor’s guilt. ‘I should have liked,’
he said on Desert Island Disks, ‘to have
been killed in the war,’ and wrote that soldiers
like him – a boffin, a desk wallah
who had not served in the frontline carried
‘a sort of shame with them to the grave.’

One of his poems begins ‘When I am gone,
remember me…’ seemingly addressed
to his mother. After marriage he published
no more poems but wrote one for each
of their wedding anniversaries.
His wife buried the forty or so with him.

‘When I am gone, remember me, not often,
but when the east grey light is growing.’
By happenstance, a word he would have used,
he is leading forever northwards his
motley squad of the dead.

 

 

Note: Another poem about Enoch Powell – ONLY ONE IN STEP – was first published on the site in 2010: https://davidselzer.com/2010/04/only-one-in-step/

THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

'Lion', Babel, circa 583 BC
'Lion', Babel, circa 583 BC


 

‘Arma virumque cano’ was birched

into pimply boys who ruled their thin red lines

at every degree. Till the sun set

on heart-shaped continents, DCs in the bush

carried Caesar in their khaki shorts. Gaul or

Matabele, order was where empire

prevailed. Rule of law is a state of mind.

Ovid exiled himself. Virgil wrote

two lines a day in his villa near Naples.

On unmapped plains, horsemen manoeuvred.

Their descendants herd goats. Power, I sing, and

illusion – managing a barbarous,

imperious language.