from Dante Études: Book Three: In My Youth Not Unstaind

By Robert Duncan 1919–1988 Robert Duncan

[Étude from the Fourth Treatise of the Convivio, Chapter XXVII]

In my youth, not unstaind

and in much ignoble; in manhood,

struggling to ring true yet

knowing often my defection from

these graces Dante lists

proper to Man: temperance, courage,

love, courtesy,

and loyalty. I speak still

to sustain his meaning in my own.

And, in you, whatever I have known

of grace comes through to me.

Now, upon old age: “Our life

has a fixt course and a simple path”

I would not avoid, “that of our right nature”

—then Dante adds, himself quoting:

“and in every part of our life

place is given for certain things”:

a memory of the good of things before,

a knowledge of good things present,

and foresight of things yet to be made good—

ennobling song, truth’s clarion,

beauty renderd lasting in the mind,

obedience to our common cause

stirrd once again,

that music that to orders larger than

mankind

restoreth man.

Robert Duncan, “from Dante Études: Book Three: In My Youth Not Unstaind” 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)

Biography

Described by Kenneth Rexroth as “one of the most accomplished, one of the most influential” of the postwar American poets, Robert Duncan was an important part of both the Black Mountain school of poetry, led by Charles Olson, and the San Francisco Renaissance, whose other members included poets Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. A distinctive voice in American poetry, Duncan’s idiosyncratic poetics drew on myth, occultism, . . .

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