Donald Davie, Remembering the Thirties

(Barnes and Noble)
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Amanda Vaill is mentioning this poem by Donald Davie in her Hotel Florida, to explain a certain ambivalence we cannot escape when trying to re-enact the relevant events of past generations, beginning with the one that just preceded us (an ambivalence going both ways: from us trying to revive the past, and from the past itself, trying to keep in time an impossible relevance).

Put it this way: are the lessons of history relevant? Don't they come to us distorted?

Hearing one saga, we enact the next.

We please our elders when we sit enthralled;

But then they're puzzled; and at last they're vexed

To have their youth so avidly recalled.

It dawns upon the veterans after all

That what for them were agonies, for us

Are high-brow thrillers, though historical;

And all their feats quite strictly fabulous.

This novel written fifteen years ago,

Set in my boyhood and my boyhood home,

These poems about abandoned workings', show

Worlds more remote than Ithaca or Rome.

The Anschluss, Guernica ? all the names

At which those poets thrilled or were afraid

For me mean schools and headmasters and games;

And in the process someone is betrayed.

Ourselves perhaps. The Devil for a joke

Might carve his own initials on our desk,

And yet we'd miss the point because he spoke

An idiom too dated, Audenesque.

Ralegh's Guiana also killed his son.

A pretty pickle if we came to see

The tallest story really packed a gun,

The Telemachiad an Odyssey.

2

Even to them the tales were not so true

As not to be ridiculous as well;

The ironmaster met his Waterloo,

But Rider Haggard rode along the fell.

Leave for Cape Wrath tonight!' They lounged away

On Fleming's trek or Isherwood's ascent.

England expected every man that day

To show his motives were ambivalent.

They played the fool, not to appear as fools

In time's long glass. A deprecating air

Disarmed, they thought, the jeers of later schools;

Yet irony itself is doctrinaire,

And, curiously, nothing now betrays

Their type to time's derision like this coy

Insistence on the quizzical, their craze

For showing Hector was a mother's boy.

A neutral tone is nowadays preferred.

And yet it may be better, if we must,

To praise a stance impressive and absurd

Than not to see the hero for the dust.

For courage is the vegetable king,

The sprig of all ontologies, the weed

That beards the slag-heap with his hectoring,

Whose green adventure is to run to seed.

(http://allpoetry.com/Remembering-The-%27Thirties)

(Donald Davie)

(Amanda Vaill)