MI RITROVAI
Here I was refound by a dark self;
My self was found by a darker self, obscure.
I was not one self, but made of wood
Within this wood – not single, but multiplied
On into darkness. No
way to see for rest,
For all the trees, for all the terza rima.
A tree grows in the wood – what would you have me
Do? They all diverge
into the darkness,
Dive into darkness, urge to obscurity.
How could one do anything but fall
Into a swoon, svanire?
One cannot
Stand this, one cannot stand in the middle
Of this. And then I
was found out by an
Obscure greeting – salve – strange advice
From something dark and savage that nonetheless
Spoke of salvage, through the loss, darkly.
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.
I back myself to the edge of a dark shelf.
Man hands on misery to man, it deepens —
So much deepens that one cannot stand
Here, in the middle of this mirror trove.
— Jennifer Clarvoe
from The Antioch
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Note by Judith Hall
Dante’s pilgrim begins in a forest and ends
looking at the stars. Lucky pilgrim, whose inarticulate terror is met and
cleared by faith, hope, and charity! Clarvoe’s figure faces “a darker self,
obscure” and speaks in the end in the tongues of stars: Dante, Marianne Moore
Philip Larkin.
Recognition haunts but may not edify,
not immediately, if “strange” or unsought:
Dante’s doubt; Moore’s
despair; Larkin’s beloved selfishness. Such blessings, such lessons — nearly a
parody of succor — are familiar and perverse: symbols Baudelaire would’ve
flung at any earnest reader: doubt,
despair, selfishness.
Blake thought
Dante saw clearly but did not always comprehend his visions. Clarvoe
comprehends the very postmodern terror of a “mirror trove.” Clarity, in this
context, is irrelevant. Obscurity, as in Monet’s late water lilies, or Dickinson's
circuits, tells a slanted truth no less enchanting for its complications.