[ilds] Persian Ladies

[Bruce Redwine]

I wonder, Charles, on this remembrance day, if you could provide a context for this poem.  Perhaps you have an idea about all the unknowns:  the "lady," the "he," the "I," the "it," the "city," etc.


Bruce
 

-----Original Message-----
>From: slighcl <slighcl at wfu.edu>
>Sent: Feb 27, 2008 5:26 AM
>To: ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: [ilds] 2.27.2008: music that stains / the silence remains
>
>Lawrence George Durrell 
>27 February 1912   ~   7 November 1990
>
>**
>
>A PERSIAN LADY
>
>Some diplomatic mission---no such thing as 'fate' ---
>Brought her to the city that ripening spring.
>She was much pointed out---a Lady-in-Waiting---
>To some Persian noble; well, and here she was
>Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance.
>By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches,
>By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels.
>
>He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty,
>The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron:
>The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes;
>How would one say 'to enflame' in her tongue,
>He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty?
>When their eyes met he felt dis-figured
>It would have been simple---three paces apart!
>
>Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go,
>The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes
>Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory.
>Next day he deliberately left the musical city
>To join a boring water-party on the lake.
>Telling himself 'Say what you like about it,
>I have been spared very much in this business.'
>
>He meant, I think, that never should he now
>Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow
>Spiral of her beauty's deterioration, flagging desires,
>The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke,
>Grey temple, long slide into fat.
>
>On the other hand neither would she build him sons
>Or be a subject for verses---the famished in-bred poetry
>Which was the fashion of his time and ours.
>She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact
>Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins
>In a biography the year of birth and death.
>
>1964/ 1961