A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

(for Wade Jennings)

1

There is a kind of sweet distress
In children dancing out of time;
Attendant on that awkwardness
A mute unsureness, a duress
Whose only succor is finesse;
It is as though
They know,
Sensing the aisles’ restlessness,
Though it stand only for a time
And though
It be blameless
It be nameless,
Still
They count it as a crime
If step stagger and go rhymeless;
In this as any public chance
The circling plane whereon they dance,
There is this kindredness, distressed
As children dancing out of time
Until
In time it rest.

2

Divine Cecilia, patroness
Of every great, of every less,
Of David when he rose and sang,
Of Dryden for whom heaven rang;
Holy lady, blessed to bless
Our every fiddled unsuccess,
Keep this at least and keep our time,
Preserving song at least from sin,
Our sickness and the public crime,
And startle like a violin.

3

Who would not care that whistling Chiron came?
Given the grandeur of a god whose care might cause
Grief to those mortals who had thought them grand,
He gave them gladness, which gave him pause,
The careless gladness of gut-bucket bands
Whanging such chords as Clotho never framed,
Until those care-worn mortals, fraught with chance,
Fingered their bow-strings to the fretted lance
And quit their killing: on Naxos as in Nashville still, they dance.

4

Who would not care that whistling Chiron came;
Where have those passions fled, wherein the blame?
So would not Charon call to his dark lord
A dearth of silvers in the mouths of that dark hoard?
Where that red money fled, wherein the blame?
Who would not care that Chiron came?
Who does not owe that ancient man a cock?
Who led the very dead to rise and rock,
Who taught the quick; to die’s the rhythmic knock
Of song advancing after music ceases,
Of children dancing on a tilting star,
Or, moved to music by an old guitar,
Of spoons clack-clacked on knees because it pleases.
Divine Cecilia, dearest cause
Of hoofers and of poets, pause
And grant us from the silver throat
Of horns that higher, hotter lick,
On polished necks the quicker quick,
The wild imperishable note.

Editor’s note: Image from Wikipedia Commons; edited in MS Image Composer. But more importantly, I hope our readers are beginning to hear the voice of this poet, Thomas Thornburg, who has made the remarkable effect of drawing our modernity back into the centuries from which it rose. We are what we were.