Read Online Collected Earlier Poems by Anthony Hecht - Free Book Online Page A

badge
    Of beauty, and the region of her nose
    Seemed to be made so delicate and thin,
    Light of the sun might touch the cartilage
    With numerous golden tones and hints of rose
    If she but turned to the window now to smell
    The lilacs and the undulant green lawn,
    Trim as a golf course, where a haze revealed
    The sheep, distinguished each with a separate bell,
    Grazing and moping near the neighbor field
    Where all the clover-seeking bees were gone,
    But stood in modesty in the full sight
    Of Memling, whose accomplished busy hand
    Rendered this wimpled lady in such white
    Untinted beauty, that she seems to stand
    Even as gently to our present gaze
    As she had stood there in her breathing days.
    Seeing this painting, I am put in mind
    Of many a freakish harridan and clown
    Who by their native clumsiness or fate
    Won for themselves astonishing renown
    And stand amongst us even to this date
    Since art and history were so inclined:
    Here, in a generous Italian scene,
    A pimpled, chinless shepherd, whose rough thought
    And customary labor lead the ram
    Into his sheep for profit and for sport,
    Guide their ungainly pleasure with obscene
    Mirth at the comedy of sire and dam
    Till he has grossly married every ewe—
    This shepherd, in a mangy cap of fur,
    Stands at the window still regarding her,
    That only lady, if the Pope speaks true,
    Who with a grace more than we understand
    Ate of her portion with a flawless hand.
    And once a chattering agent of Pope Paul,
    A small, foul-minded clergyman, stood by
    To watch the aging Michelangelo
    Set his
Last Judgment
on the papal wall,
    And muttered thereupon that to his eye
    It was a lewd and most indecent show
    Of nakedness, not for a sacred place,
    Fitted to whorehouse or to public bath;
    At which the painter promptly drew his face
    Horribly gripped, his face a fist of pain,
    Amongst those fixed in God’s eternal wrath,
    And when the fool made motion to complain
    He earned this solemn judgment of the Pope:
    “Had art set you on Purgatory’s Mount
    Then had I done my utmost for your hope,
    But Hell’s fierce immolation takes no count
    Of offices and prayers, for as you know,
    From that place
nulla est redemptio
.”
    And I recall certain ambassadors,
    Cuffed all in ermine and with vests of mail
    Who came their way into the town of Prague
    Announced by horns, as history tells the tale,
    To seek avoidances of future wars
    And try the meaning of the Decalogue,
    But whispers went about against their names.
    And so it happened that a courtier-wit,
    Hating their cause with an intemperate might,
    Lauded his castle’s vantage, and made claims
    Upon their courtesy to visit it,
    And having brought them to that famous height
    To witness the whole streamed and timbered view
    Of his ancestral property, and smell
    His fine ancestral air, he pushed them through
    The open-standing window, whence they fell,
    Oh, in a manner worthy to be sung,
    Full thirty feet into a pile of dung.
    How many poets, with profoundest breath,
    Have set their ladies up to spite the worm,
    So that pale mistress or high-busted bawd
    Could smile and spit into the eye of death
    And dance into our midst all fleshed and firm
    Despite she was most perishably flawed?
    She lasts, but not in her own body’s right,
    Nor do we love her for her endless poise.
    All of her beauty has become a part
    Of neighboring beauty, and what could excite
    High expectations among hopeful boys
    Now leaves her to the nunnery of art.
    And yet a searching discipline can keep
    That eye still clear, as though in spite of Hell,
    So that she seems as innocent as sheep
    Where they still graze, denuded of their smell,
    Where fool still writhes upon the chapel wall,
    A shepherd stares, ambassadors still fall.
    Adam and Eve knew such perfection once,
    God’s finger in the cloud, and on the ground
    Nothing but springtime, nothing else at all.
    But in our fallen state where the blood hunts
    For blood, and rises at the hunting sound,
    What do we know of lasting since