I.. Drink... Your POESY!

The Room

C. Day Lewis (for George Seferis)

To this room—it was somewhere at the palace's
Heart, but no one, not even visiting royalty
Or reigning mistress, ever had been inside it—
To this room he'd retire.
Graciously giving himself to, guarding himself from
Courtier, supplicant, stiff ambassador,
Supple assassin, into this unviewed room
He, with the air of one urgently called from
High affairs to some yet loftier duty,
Dismissing them all, withdrew.


And we imagined it suitably fitted out
For communing with a God, for meditation
On the Just City; or, at the least, a bower of
Superior orgies...He
Alone could know the room as windowless
Though airy, bare yet filled with the junk you find
In any child-loved attic; and how he went there
Simply to taste himself, to be reassured
That under the royal action and abstraction
He lived in, he was real.




This is from a collection called "Poet's Choice," edited by a Paul Engle and a Joseph Langland. It's unique in that each of the one hundred poets collected therein is allowed to choose a single poem, their favorite or what they consider their greatest or just what struck their fancy, and then write a brief page or so explaining their choice.


C. Day Lewis (yes, father of eminent scene-chewer-in-residence Daniel Day Lewis) offers this note:


"I have chosen this poem partly because it is the last one I have written, and I always want the last one I have written to be my best, and generally it seems my best - for a few hours, or even days, after I have written it.


"I also like it because it is a profoundly personal poem which reads (I hope) like an impersonal one. It began with the phrase "to taste himself"; what it i s saying, from the personal point of view, is that I, like almost every elderly poet in England, have become involved willy-nilly in activities - committees, lectures, public stances - which have little to do with making poems, and which tend to diminish my reality, or at least my feeling of being real. The room the King goes into is his solitude, his sanctum - the part of him inviolate from public preoccupations, uncorrupted by public business.


"But of course the poem should have a similar meaning - about solitude and integrity - for any man or woman. If it has not, but is interpreted simply as yet another poem about 'the poet's predicament in the modern world,' or some such boring specialised (sic) subject - then it is worthless.


"Perhaps a better reason for choosing it is that Seferis, whom I believe to be the greatest living European poet, let me dedicate it to him."


I like the candor of giving such a trivial reason for considering it his best, especially since I've only once or twice written something which I didn't immediately after find a masterwork, or at least a worthy addition to my personal canon. It's always the greatest thing I've ever done, until it's not. (And invariably it's not.)


But am I the only one who finds "to taste himself" slightly grotesque?