POEM
from Dante Études, Book One: We Will Endeavor
[De Vulgari Eloquentia, I,I]
“We will endeavor,
the word aiding us from Heaven,
to be of service
to the vernacular speech”
—from “Heaven” these
“draughts of the sweetest honey-milk”,
si dolcemente
from the language we first heard
endearments whisperings
infant song and revery
a world we wanted to go out into,
to come to ourselves into,
organizations in the sound of them
verging upon meaning,
upon “Heaven”,
hermetic talk
into which my range of understandings
was to grow for love of it
portents
and adults expounding
controversial doctrines, personal
science fictions and
rules of order,
but our own
“is that which we acquire without
any rule” for love of it
“imitating our nurses”
Robert Duncan, “from Dante Études, Book One: We Will Endeavor” from Ground Work: Before the War / In the Dark. Copyright © 1984 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Source: Ground Work: Before the War / In the Dark (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1984)
Though the name Robert Duncan is not well known outside the literary world, within that . . . MORE »
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