Jeffrey Robinson : Pocket Dante: Keats and Mandelstam
========================================== return to TOC for issue: Spring '10
Introduction
Dante walks in back pockets of both poets, making the air tremble and sigh. In 1818
Keats carries “those three little volumes” to Scotland, to Burns country where weary feet
forget themselves and Eagles may
seem
to sleep wing wide
upon the Air.
In 1937 Mandelstam—whose name, Osip, echoed that of Iosif Stalin’s “Anticipating his
arrest. . ,—obtained an edition of The Divine Comedy in small format and always had it
with him in his pocket, just in case he was arrested not at home but in the street.”
“blind world” “no plaint was heard
Except of sighs”
“that made the eternal air
tremble”
Broad-chested imps of power,
fingers like worms
decree
plunge of song
In this world are rhymes.
Wrench them apart and
the world shudders.
Nightingale: a divine
concentrated
melodic comedy
Goldfinch: with Jewish yellows and blacks,
flush of Jewish doom on your chin
“What a flashy finch you are!”
a poet’s speech begins
a great way off:
the way of comets
Mandelstam: “It’s not for me to build a home,
Settling at the crossroads.”
I get lost in the sky.”
Keats: “I then suddenly forgot which was North or South.”
1934: singer soon disappeared
to sing
or fell timber
for bread
lay like a mouse on bed
restlessness all over him
I see his lips moving
Dead now
treading
his lips still moving
