Idlers

Among my treasures, I count among the chief The Viking Portable Library: Poets of the English Language, published in 1950 and edited by Norman Holmes Pearson and W. H. Auden. In five fat little volumes, each measuring only six and a half by four inches, but each an inch and a half thick, I find my education in verse. Auden has been perhaps my best, though hardly my only teacher in poetry.

If The Oxford Book of English Verse, in Arthur Quiller-Couch's edition, is dear to me still, Auden's annotated anthology has been the more instructive. My set was purchased not all so long ago, to replace the two stray volumes I had from a discard bin at a used bookstore I worked at years ago in Southern California. Those old strays -- Romantic Poets: Blake to Poe & Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets: Marlowe to Marvel -- cost me nothing and taught me much. Having the full set of five, I undertook something like serious study; beginning again at the beginning with the first and most difficult volume, Medieval and Renaissance Poets: Langland to Spenser, and using the pronunciation key, and Auden's introductions, to read early English poetry for the first time. Reading that book was the only reason, I should think, that it even occured to me to try Chaucer again, at least in bits. (For years, my friend R. has periodically attempted to interest me in Chaucer's poetry, as apposed to just the writer. Seems R. required the help of Wystan Hugh Auden & others to budge me.) If Helen Hanff's Q's Legacy set me to reading The Oxford for myself, and so gave me the confidence for the classics of English poetry that my education never had, it wasn't until Auden's anthology that I began to appreciate the evolution of verse. I may never learn to love Spenser, for instance, but I doubt I would have read even the little I have, had it not been for The Viking Portable. (Years ago, another respected friend told me I would "love" Spencer and find in him just my "sort of thing." Turns out, that friend didn't actually know me very well at all.)

Talking tonight, long distance, with my friend R., I was reminded first, how much I miss him every day, now that we no longer live in the same city, and second, of how much poetry he brought with him into our friendship. R. has gently grouched, with some justification, that I have seldom really read the poets he has recommended over the years. Often as not, these have been poets very dear to R., a poet himself. But it is not entirely true to say his recommendations to me went unheeded. I may not have responded immediately to, say, W. S. Merwin, but if I read so much as a poem of his now, it is because R. brought Merwin to me. My friend reads poetry naturally, as he might read a novel or a newspaper. As a poet, R. is open to poetry in a way I never quite, or only more recently, learned to be. Writing it as well as reading it, poetry is as much a part of my friend R., for me, as his conversation, his laugh, his nose. Had I not had such a friend, I wonder that poetry should have ever become for me what it is.

So just as Helen Hanff led me to "Q" and he to The Oxford Book of Verse, so Isherwood to Auden, and Auden now to so many, many poems not his own. Our best teachers send us on to the next, and the next, in my experience.

And so my friend R. has taught and led me, albeit not always in directions intended (-- I've never quite got to Ashberry, for example.) So thinking now about R., about poetry, about the past and the present state of our now lifelong friendship, I do not doubt, I was led yet again to Auden, though this time not to the Viking Portable, but to another anthology altogether: 19th Century British Minor Poets, edited with an introduction unsurprisingly by W. H. Auden. And therein I found a poem, by Hartley Coleridge -- a son, by the way, who made his more famous, and famously dissipated, father look like something of a piker when it came to failed promise, a favorite theme of mine. No matter though. I love the minor talent all the better for being nearer. Beyond the title, this poem reminds me just how many of my best memories are of places visited with my friend R., and of how my memories aren't really, or only incidentally are of anything other than the good company of my friends.

FRIENDSHIP

"When we were idlers with the loitering rills,
The need of human love we little noted:
...Our love was nature; and the peace that floated
On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,
To sweet accord subdued our wayward will:
...One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,
...That, wisely doting, ask'd not why it doted,
And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.
But now I find how dear thou wert to me;
...That man is more than half of nature's treasure,
Of that fair beauty which no eye can see,
...Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;
...And now the streams may sing for others' pleasure,
The hills sleep on in their eternity."