Lament for the Makers: 1964

Those black shoes broken in for the burial
At Drumcliff, MacNeice grew inured to: they were old
When he wore them to the burial in Laugharne.
Now he will not stoop again to pull on his shoes:
He, too, is buried. And if a bird of gold
Begins to sing? Snow falls where roses blow? Or a stale fern
Seeds? Then these deaths are mocked apocryphal news.

The deaths are mocked by the work. But the work is finished
With the lives and the minds that shaped it. Punctual as bills,
Though more like receipts, the books on Yeats arrive.
But not one poem by the poet arrives. The masks
His proud hands lifted gaily, the stubborn skills
Are lost. His folly, his rage, his ecstasy survive
In lines the young man envies, in a question the scholar asks.

Too, that vain Bard, first famished and then battered
By tragic circumstance, who yet brimmed his verse
With a Virgilian calm — he does not twinkle now
At the Dog Star, twinkling. Frost’s gone. And before him went
Four more; who, all but one, would laugh, all but one, curse:
Stevens. Fearing. Jeffers, e.e.c. — How
Believe that what each left was his last testament?

And what was Stevens’? Again from his ivory tower
He invites us to look down with him at the dump
And surveying, savor with his fruition the spread
Feast — of being, of poetry, sordor, radiance.
He offers hilarity, birdsong and rock, offers the glittering trump
Of summer’s triumph, then the grave peace shed,
Saluting the quietus of the dance.

Next, his friend, Williams. Let him show you, my countrymen,
How to perform a funeral, his own.
The hearse open, weathered, wheels fresh gilt, or none.
No flowers; behind the plain coffin all the mourners walk.
He was an American: his ancestors English, Dutch, French, even, as is known,
A Jew. Not strange that this poet should live on like one,
With sparrows keener than Yeats’s eagle, tougher than Jeffers’ hawk.

The animals haunting Roethke were minimal creatures:
Toad, newt, slug, elver; “the ugly of the universe”
Rejoiced that anxious heart, like every lovely thing:
The dazzling finch, roses, the dance of love. Though night
Shuddered with anguish that deepest horrors nurse,
From the abyss he cried, and crying, he would sing,
His gross body stretched toward— look! — a quenchless light.

Lament for the makers; it will never be over.
Dante could not believe death had undone
So many; since he said so, how many has death undone?
How many will death take tomorrow, or this year, certainly?
Dunbar made his lament over Chaucer and Henrysoun
And Walter Kennedy. Now we must make our own.
There is no end to grief. Nor no end to poetry.