Vol. 16 No. 5 · 10 March 1994
Poem

From: The Advice of Proteus Orpheus Dies, and the God Seeks Out Silenus

Peter Redgrove

877 words

You need to sign in or subscribe to read more articles

Subscribe and get unlimited access to our complete archive

Subscribe

In memoriam H.S.

It is sweet and decorous
To light the fire in the hearth and dream
Of the death of poets. The boulders
Follow him, scoring huge trenches
To where he sits on a hill, letting the wind
Play his lyre; it was Aeolus who played it
And Orpheus fitted words to the improvised music,
As I do now, to the jumping figures in the fire
That rends and heals, my spliff
Balsamic among the books
Which wear their animal skins, calves
That have followed the music of the books
To my pungent study.

She made the mistake of not stripping
Her spear of its foliage; still,
It marked his lip. Then the women
Brought out their Brenton Drum
And their squeeze-boxes so that nobody
Could hear the words of his last song, and soon
The pursuing stones got their drink of blood.
The birds flew off, having memorised from him
Their versions of song. The ground rippled
With snakes learning to sing. The lions assembled
In the music school, but they feared the women,
The women who ripped the oxen to get the bone-harrows
To reduce the poet. Decorous it is to read
From between the skins of calves
The stories of the deaths of poets.
My roach crackles in my hand.

This is where they left his face
Hanging in this bush; now the world
Will look at us with his face always; this line
Of hedge, this singing tree, this furrowed
Rock, they join to make a landscape-face
Out of the side of the mountain, improvised.

Please sign in or subscribe to read the full article.

Sign in

Send Letters To:

The Editor
London Review of Books,
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN

letters@lrb.co.uk

Please include name, address, and a telephone number.

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences