Bad Dreams
Robert Crawford
- BuyThe Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems by Peter Porter
Picador, 421 pp, £12.99, May 2010, ISBN 978 0 330 52218 2
One of the greatest elegies of the 20th century was written in a flat-roofed Australian beach house beside scribbly-gums and banksias in 1975. The poem and the circumstances out of which it grew are painful. Nearly 20 years ago the poet allowed an Australian academic, Bruce Bennett, to publish details of the events behind it in Spirit in Exile.
Letters
Vol. 33 No. 22 · 17 November 2011
From Douglas Jarman
To say, as Robert Crawford does, that Peter Porter ‘had a fondness for … well performed classical music’ is to underestimate his love and knowledge of music (LRB, 6 October). Porter’s last collection, Better than God, alone has, among other musical allusions, a poem about Haydn’s last completed collection of string quartets (Op. 77), a poem about Stravinsky and, in ‘The Violin’s Obstinacy’, references both to Schumann’s encroaching madness and to the hearing affliction which Smetana incorporated into his First String Quartet (‘the E of deafness’).
‘An Exequy’ not only refers to Henry King’s poem but in its final line quotes Bach’s funeral motet BWV 228. This isn’t ‘just clever stuff’. Like a knowledge of the original King, a knowledge of the Bach (and, in particular, of the text of the finale chorale) adds a further layer of meaning – and a heartbreaking poignancy – to Porter’s poem.
Douglas Jarman
Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire
From Regula Hohl Trillini
Robert Crawford says of the ‘measured yet unexpected conclusion’ of ‘An Exequy’: ‘The German words spoken in the last line may not be wholly comforting: they beckon the guilt-ridden man into death.’ This is correct if we assume that the inverted commas around ‘Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir’ signal direct speech. However, they could also be quotation marks. In Isaiah 43, Jehovah reassures his people: ‘Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine … Fear not: for I am with thee.’ So this is not only a beckoning from Hades or a world-weary invitation to a Christian Hereafter, but also an Old Testament blessing.
Regula Hohl Trillini
University of Basel
