Libertinage. Jaargang 5

5/6 September-December 1952

[p. 305]

[Robert Lowell: gedichten]

Santayana's farewell to the blue sisters

The spirit giveth life, will letters kill
The calm eccentric if, by Heaven's will,
He found the Church too good to be believed?
‘You'll die,’ the sisters answer, ‘as you lived.’
One wonders how they riddled what I wrote,
Or if the nuns were too pragmatical
To nurse illusion long. Believing Paul,
Most miserable of men, had missed the boat
By preaching truth was what his hand could reach,
I gave the bottomless Evangel soul;
Essence took heart and landscape from my speech.
Dying, I fancied the blue sisters, pressed
Like geese-girls, hissing, ‘Rome must give her best,’
Till Curtius in full armor filled the hole.

Robert Lowell

[p. 306]

Epitaph for a fallen poet

When England gives the laurel to some dope
Or screw who scrubs Catullus' tongue with soap,
Perhaps he will consider why I took
This crooked turn instead of Uncle Sam's
Good offices which only health can buy.
Because I knew my classics like a book,
Stranger from England, tell the British, I,
Catullus Redivivus, once the rage
Of Rome and Paris, used to play your rôle
Of homosexual wolfing the stray lambs
Who hunger by the Place de la Concorde.
My profit was a pocket with a hole.
Who asks for X, the Shelley of the age,
Must pay pound sterling for his bed and board.

Robert Lowell

Jan.-9, 1953.

Evenmin als ander, door ons in de afgelopen jaargang opgenomen werk van buitenlanders, zijn de hierbij afgedrukte verzen reeds eerder elders gepubliceerd; de dichter stond ze speciaal voor ‘Libertinage’ af. Van Lowell verscheen in 1950 bij Faber te Londen een door hemzelf verzorgde keuze uit zijn eerder in Amerika gepubliceerde bundels. Over Lowell zie men ook het stuk van Karl Shapiro in ‘Libertinage’ 1952, nr. 2.