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Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2000 11:33:10 -0500
From: "Patrick T. Rourke" <ptrourke@mediaone.net>
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Subject: John Davies
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 > Is the Brooks-Davies' edition a later (or an earlier)
 > version of this Everyman collection?

Yes it is (1992, rather than 1947).  I thought I had a copy of Nosce Teipsum
somewhere, but I couldn't find it (I thought I had the '47 Silver Poets
somewhere, too, but . . . ).  Anyway, *Nosce Teipsum* has been displaced in
the 1992 edition by Mary Sidney Herbert's version of *The Triumph of Death*
and Drayton's *Endymion and Phoebe* (as well as *Astraea*).  Nice, cheap 
paperback.

 > Ah, but Stanley Kunitz, my favorite living American poet, who has just
 > been appointed, at age 95, our Poet Laureate, called "Orchestra" an
 > "Elizabethan treasure" ("Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz,"
 > ed. by Stanley Moss, Sheep Meadow Press, 1993, p. 9).  Kunitz and
 > Theodore Roethke used to play a game into the wee hours, knocking
 > back drinks and trying to stump each other by reading bits of
out-of-the-way
 > poems.

I can't think of a twentieth century poet who would have been better 
prepared to appreciate *Orchestra* than the author of "My Papa's 
Waltz."  But "My Papa's Waltz," being a lyric (and a damned good one), 
lies much more gently on the ear than the long *Orchestra.*  Don't get 
me wrong,  *Orchestra* is a good poem; I just find it grating after 
about 10 stanzas. 

But I note that Roethke didn't use the same stanza form in "Four for 
John Davies" (a medium-sized sequence, and a good one, that I hand't 
noticed before, so I'm glad that DL brought it up) that Davies used in 
*Orchestra*:

Davies:

Lo, this is Dancing's true nobility,
Dancing, the child of Music and of Love;
Dancing itself, both love and harmony,
Where all agree and all in order move;
Dancing, the art that all arts do approve:
  The fair character of the world's consent,
  The heaven's true figure, and the Earth's ornament.

Roethke:

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
That made him think the universe could hum?
The great wheel turns its axle when it can;
I need a place to sing, and dancing-room,
And I have made a promise to my ears
I'll sing and whistle romping with the bears.

(As DL said, Yeats's influence is obvious here, in the language as well 
as the movement of the lines.)

Interestingly, this (final) stanza reminds me of Coleridge:

Davies:

O that I might that singing swallow hear,
To whom I owe my service and my love:
His sugared tunes would so enchant mine ear
And in my mind such sacred fury move
As I should knock at heaven's great gate above
  With my proud rhymes, while of this heavenly state
  I do aspire the shadow to relate.

Coleridge, obviously:

Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair! . . .

Probably not a mark of influence (and I'm sure that at least half of the 
folks reading have no idea what I'm talking about: the meter is quite 
different, and the imagery seems different, too), but an interesting 
contrast.

[Classical content: the John Davies poems all have significant classical 
allusions and themes, as does the Drayton epyllion.]

Patrick Rourke
ptrourke@mediaone.net

.