Not Unloved Poem by gershon hepner

Not Unloved



Not unloved or overweight, I’ve had my fun,
and only rarely shut out lovers like a wall,
and will continue writing poems, one by one
about whatever lovers I can still recall.
I will not hide my suffering under gentleness,
at least until I feel exhausted, which I don’t,
and though I’m often warned by friends that more is less,
and urged to give up love and writing—well, I won’t!

Inspired by lines from a poem by Lawrence Durell in an article (“The Poetry and Music of the Alexandria Quarter”) in the TLS, August 22 & 29,2008:

“On First Looking into Loeb’s Horace” is a pointer to the novels in another way. Poems and novels make uncertain allies if only because both like to tell stories. But the poet in Durrell is never far away in his fiction. The Loeb poem is a masked short story: the Latin Golden Age poet Horace epitomizes the Mediterranean virtues and vices – a selfish fat man, vain, but also a writer of genius. Durrell composes a mini-novel by remembering a lover who had made notes in the margin of a Loeb student edition of Horace’s poems. As he traces their affair, he senses in her marginalia’s summary of the Roman’s personality, a shrewd discerning of his own. The creative writer’s need to distance himself from involvement, however romantic his attachment, is a match for the long-dead poet’s chilly self-regard.
So perfect a disguise for one who had
Exhausted death in art – yet who could guess
You would discern the liar by a line,
The suffering hidden under gentleness
And add upon the fly-leaf in your tall
Clear hand: “Fat, human and unloved,
And held from loving by a sort of wall,
Laid down his books and lovers one by one,
Indifference and success had crowned them
all.”
In the novels Durrell marshals his characters with the same ruthless determination as the female lover in the poem. Yet his method is an open one – the reader perceives that the way these people are dissected reflects on the figure of Darley quite as much as on them. Alexandria becomes for them a guide to personal revelation. Darley would see himself either as an unmoved mover, an Isherwoodian observer, the camera who simply records; or he might prefer to be the suffering catalyst of the actions that bedevil them. But the reader begins to appreciate the strategy; the Durrell personality can be filleted out of the action, leaving a huge ground plan of contradictory and bewildered people trapped by history on a darkling plain.

8/30/08

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