Today, with Alyn’s lifework in front of us, it is easy to trace passion, lightness, and light from his early poems to their maturation in the later poems. Bach and jazz melodies with transcendence. It is the same sacred, weightless, timeless counterpoint that fills the music of J. S. This is the spirit that I have attempted to capture in my own translation of the poem. All reveal an inextinguishable yearning for purity and, with minimalist precision, fuse the infinite and the minuscule. The chiseled, prismatic conciseness of his words was not yet fully discernible to British scholars trained in the classical poetics of pre-1945.

When he wrote “The Poem to the Poet,” Marc Alyn had not yet experienced the liberating presence of the European South nor its southeastern borders all the way to the Middle East. True, the present is always difficult to analyze and its directions unfathomable. Lucie-Smith’s translation bears a gracefulness that is echoed in the preface where both editors expound upon nineteenth-century French and British poetry yet appear tongue-tied about the merits of the younger poets whom they included in their anthology. With this poem from the volume Délébiles, Simon Watson Taylor and Edward Lucie-Smith opened their 1972 anthology of French poetry, French Poetry Today: A Bilingual Anthology. I am not where you bear down, I am the seguewayīetween secrets that are blind to each other Not in the lightning but in the sequence of the dream. One jamb at a time, word by word, body to body, Like the mirror traps the glaciers’ bird.Įmbrace the page, you must be born again, Slow is the night that looks through your eyes. To capture the cloud and the ploughshare, Falcon photo courtesy of Quentin Dr / Unsplash

The Waking Dream by Edward Lucie-Smith