Home > Poetry Magazine > Ode

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

Ode

By David Lehman b. 1948 David Lehman

People in the middle ages didn't think they were living

Between two more important and enlightened eras;

Nor did they see themselves as the players

In act three of a tragedy in five acts.

It was not always late winter in the middle ages.

People in the middle ages were not all middle-aged

Though it is enjoyable on occasion to assume that they were.

The sun was as bright in the dark ages

As it is now—maybe a fraction brighter, in fact.

Think of the middle ages and what do you see:

Gloomy cathedrals, students dressed like monks in the rain,

Or a band of drunken pilgrims telling obscene jokes,

Or heroes embarking for the nearest wilderness come April?

Your answer will reveal yourself to yourself

But you may not know it—may choose to hide

In hazy visions of a serene and indescribable paradise.

And paradise, as we all know, may be paradise when we’re dead,

But is boredom on earth, alas.

We never think of ennui in relation to the middle ages.

Should we? Did Thomas Aquinas never get bored

Cooking up elaborate refutations of diminutive heresies?

No, and you shouldn’t either. Nor did the clerks

of Oxford tire of the sin against the Holy Ghost,

Trying to figure out what it was.

On chill September mornings when

I smoked too much the night before

And I drank too much the night before

And a sinister cough rises up

From the depths of the belly of my being,

I like to imagine living in Provence

Or even in Rheims during the middle ages.

David Lehman, "Ode" from An Alternative to Speech, published by Princeton University Press. Copyright © 1986 by David Lehman. Reprinted by permission of Writers' Representatives, Inc..

Source: Poetry (November 1979).

Biography

One of the foremost editors, literary critics, and anthologists of contemporary American literature, David Lehman is also one of its most accomplished poets. Born in New York City in 1948, Lehman earned a PhD from Columbia University and attended the University of Cambridge as a Kellett Fellow. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Yeshiva Boys (2009), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005); and The Evening . . .

Continue reading this biography