This week another elegiac poem by Frances Horovitz (1938-1983), foreshadowing her own early death (see week 80).

I have tried to figure out if the particular flowers mentioned, soapwort and figwort, are meant to have any special symbolic resonance for the poem, but nothing obvious comes to my mind. Soapwort yields a vegetable saponin used as a laundering agent by mediaeval fullers, figwort is so named not because it had anything to do with the fruit, but because it was used as a curative for the ‘fig’, or piles. So possibly one has to ascribe their particular appearance in the poem to happenstance: these are simply the flowers the poet picked that day that stuck in her mind, perhaps because they are not especially well-known or celebrated.

But the poem as a whole surely does have a resonance, and a mythopoeic one at that. That final image of the poet holding up the flowers ‘as torch and talisman/Against the coming dark’ – just so, one thinks, might the flower-gathering Persephone have held up her blooms in a last affirmation of life and springtime before dark Hades carried her off to his underworld.

Flowers
(for Winifred Nicholson)

Flowers,
a dozen or more,
I picked one summer afternoon
from field and hedgerow.
Resting against a wall
I held them up
to hide the sun.
Cell by cell,
exact as dance,
I saw the colour,
structure, purpose
of each flower.
I named them with their secret names.
They flamed in air.

But, waking
I remember only two
– soapwort and figwort,
the lilac and the brown.
The rest I guess at
but cannot see
– only myself,
almost a ghost upon the road,
without accoutrement,
holding the flowers
as torch and talisman
against the coming dark.

Frances Horovitz

This is one of the poems from the sequence ‘Xenia II’, written by the Italian poet Eugenio Montale in 1967 in memory of his wife Drusilla Tanzi (see also week 370). A recurrent theme in the sequence, as here, is her short-sightedness, paradoxically played off against the acuteness of her vision in other ways, her gift, the poet claims, for seeing what is truly important in life, that allowed her to transcend the limited, quotidian view of reality believed in by some. Like the other poems in the sequence, it manages to combine restraint with poignancy.

Going downstairs together, of course, is not just to be taken literally, but as a symbol for negotiating life’s difficulties as a couple.

The translation that follows is my own.

Ho sceso, dandoti il braccio

‘Ho sceso, dandoti il braccio, almeno un milione di scale
e ora che non ci sei è il vuoto ad ogni gradino.
Anche così è stato breve il nostro lungo viaggio.
Il mio dura tuttora, né più mi occorrono
le coincidenze, le prenotazioni,
le trappole, gli scorni di chi crede
che la realtà sia quella che si vede.

Ho sceso milioni di scale dandoti il braccio
non già perché con quattr’occhi forse si vede di più.
Con te le ho scese perché sapevo che di noi due
le sole vere pupille, sebbene tanto offuscate,
erano le tue.’

Eugenio Montale

Giving you my arm, I have gone down

Giving you my arm, I have gone down,
At least a million stairs.
And now you are no longer here I feel
The void at every step.
So after all it has been short
This long shared voyage of ours.
Mine still goes on, and now I need no more
Coincidences, reservations,
Traps, the scorn of those believing
That reality is only what we see.

I have gone down, giving you my arm,
A million stairs, not just because
With four eyes one maybe sees more.
I went down with you because I knew
That between us two the eyes that truly saw,
For all their being so obscured, were yours.