Blue Moon | home
Dylan Thomas | Christina Rosetti | Charles Wright | Margaret Atwood | Dante Alighieri | Miguel Hernández | John Keats | Theodore Roethke | T.S. Eliot | John Milton | Amy Lowell | Sylvia Plath | W.D. Snodgrass | John Donne | Emily Dickinson | Wislawa Szymborska | Yeats, William Butler | Walt Whitman | William Blake | William Skakespeare | George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron | Robert Pinsky | Edgar Allen Poe | Gwendolyn, Brooks | Geoffery, Chaucer | Robert Graves | Muriel, Rukeyser
Robert Pinsky
Robert Pinsky (1940- )
On My Birthday Autumn Quartet
I.
Others are not the medicine for loneliness-
When I was a child, I wanted to be a knight:
Helmeted, living by a noble code
Above the crowd, to serve, to carry a sword
And a shield blazoned with symbolic meanings:
Arrogant and generous like Launcelot du Lac,
The abducted infant and uncompanioned hero.
Did part of me grow up to be a type?-
Those melancholy males who nearly twitch
With yearning for their silver armor, misplaced.
Humorless. Often the inviting lady,
Fatigued by all his brooding, slips away.
II.
But somehow it was also all mixed up
With Washington astride his horse, the ardor
Of Lafayette, the elegant sad jokes
Of Lincoln, who freed the slaves and demonstrated
That Nature's were the only real noblemen:
It was the assassin that craved the coat of arms.
In his mid-fifties, a chevalier of care,
It was heroic to scribble on the train
The speech that disappointed many people:
Too strange, too brief. And then they called it "great."
Solitary in a vivid dream he saw his mourners,
His coffin swagged in bunting, the marble hall.
III.
Older than Odysseus, older than Leopold Bloom.
Older than number forty-two was-Jack
Roosevelt Robinson-when I watched him crouch
Trembling on the basepath between first and second
With arms extended, taunting the opponent.
And now older than he was the day he died
Depleted by his solitary ordeal,
A public man. In momentary wonder,
I see him burning again, beyond me, playing
A boyish country game in the gaping cities:
Brooklyn, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Boston.
Nineteen-nineteen to nineteen-seventy-two.
IV.
The heroes of antiquity were taught
By centaurs, ancient creatures who were half
Rational intelligence, half-intuition:
Bearded and hooved, all male, a dying race.
Each solitary as the lawless Cyclops,
But pedagogical and bound by nature
To pass their lonely double knowledge on
To such as Odysseus, who learned to tell the story
Of his life, couched in as many lies as needed.
Among the epic bravos, a civic man.
The centaurs showed him truth in fabulation,
In every living city the haunted ruin.