‘Follow, poet, follow right, To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice, Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse, Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess, In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart, Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days, Teach the free man how to praise.’

These are the final stanzas of W.H. Auden’s elegy ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ written at another of history’s darkest moments, February 1939. ‘With the farming of a verse/Make a vineyard…./Teach the free man how to praise.’

It was Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s poem, with its echoes of Auden, that appeared in the Sept. 24 special 9/11 edition of the New Yorker, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” He died on March 21 this year and as Clare Cavanagh, his translator and friend, writes in her tribute to him (The Times Literary Supplement, May 14, 2021) “one obituary mistakenly claimed it was written in response to the terrorist attack it came to commemorate. It wasn’t, of course. The poem came from a deeply personal experience inflected by history.” He had lived and witnessed the horrors of Twentieth Century Europe.

‘Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, And wild strawberries, drops of rosè wine, The nettles that methodically overgrow

The abandoned homesteads of exiles. Praise the mutilated world, And the grey feather the thrush lost, And the gentle light that strays and vanishes, And returns.’

As she points out, a variation on the phrase ‘Try to Praise,’ ‘you must praise,’ ‘you should praise,’ ‘praise’ appears four times in twenty one lines. This is the poem that spoke to the suffering of that terrible day and all that has come after. Words to live by. Professor Cavanagh goes on to bemoan ‘the stock phrases used to define Adam in Poland (his work was banned from official publication in 1975) … clichès that dispense with actually seeing the person or reading the poems …. The truisms, the lazy ways of thinking about the poet and his work.’

Poland is the land of so many great poets, including 1996 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, and 1980 Nobel Prize recipient Czeslaw Milosz and others.

A recent target of such ‘lazy ways’ — perhaps also described as ‘fake news’ — is Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English Poetry (1341 or 1343 (?) — 1400). In an effort to remove Chaucer from the curriculum of the UK University of Leicester in favor of feminist, multi-cultural and other studies, he has been described as ‘a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence.’

Accusations manifestly untrue but, of course, ones that grab newspaper headlines. As we know, in our world turned upside down, medieval, classical and Shakespearean studies are under attack, but this one stands out in its mindless virulence. How poor our world would be without ‘The Canterbury Tales’ and ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ without the translation of Boethius’ ‘Consolation of Philosophy?’ How would any student understand the fundamentals of English poetry without Chaucer? Robert Frost said ‘I can HEAR Chaucer’s voice!’

As Peter Ackroyd describes so vividly in his biography of Chaucer, from his earliest youth his’ ‘ditties and glad songs’ ‘testify both to what has been called the natural music of (his) verse and to his mastery of poetic diction. … He introduced the rime-royal stanza and the terza rima into English verse; he was the first to employ the French ballad form, but he changed the French octosyllabic measure into what has become characteristically English decasyllabic: …

He invented the native measure.” But, as Ackroyd goes on to say, the court of Richard II, in which Chaucer served, was the first since the Anglo-Saxons that made English the principal language and Chaucer chose to write in his own language, ‘to adopt his native music.’ His travels as a diplomat for the royal court afforded him an introduction to the work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. The profound influence that this had on his development as a poet created the priceless legacy we have today — what tales, what folk, and none so different from ourselves.

At the close of her poem ‘At The Fishhouses’, Elizabeth Bishop likens knowledge to the cold water of the Atlantic (after a magical diversion involving a seal)

‘Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, ……..

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing and flown.’

Over continents, oceans and centuries we hear the voices of the writers, poets, essayists who have gone before us, making our knowledge ‘historical, flowing and flown’. We need them all!

In this 21st century fever of fake news it is encouraging to recall that the 17th century physician and theologian Sir Thomas Browne wrote his great work the ‘Pseudoxia Epidemica’ — the book of Vulgar or Common Errors — in direct response to an epidemic of fake news that deeply troubled the scholars and scientists of the day. As Coleridge said ‘he is a quiet and sublime Enthusiast with a strong tinge of the Fantast, the Humorist constantly mingling with and flashing across the Philosopher, as the darting colors in shot silk play upon the main dye.’

Irresistible. Browne with his endlessly curious and enquiring mind, his gentle wit and tolerance, all expressed in the finest prose in the English language, has been, and remains, a source of inspiration and delight to writers, readers and thinkers down the ages, those, along with Coleridge, such as Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, (Browne was a key influence in his writing of ‘Moby Dick’), and Elizabeth Bishop. He was, in many ways, the embodiment of Chaucer’s ‘verray, parfit, gentil knight/.’

But now I have a sense of a need to close where we came in, honoring 9/11. Not with praise but in stark recall of that brilliant blue day that turned to ashes. Here are a few lines from a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, (1923-2012) Adam Zagajewski’s compatriot and contemporary. Like him she too was, in Robert Frost’s words ‘one acquainted with the night.’

In an article in the New York Times Magazine of Dec. 1, 1996, on the occasion of her being awarded the Nobel Prize, Edward Hirsch wrote “Szymborska … investigates large unanswerable questions with terrific delicacy. She pits her dizzying sense of the world’s transient splendor against unbearable historical knowledge.” Unbearable. Historical. Knowledge.

Belinda de Kay is the emeritus director of Stonington Free Library.