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Rare Books
—Magdalen College, Oxford, November 1993
From London, westward ho, and slantwise north,
I journey into Oxfordshire and see,
through outsize windows on the Stagecoach bus,
green meadows framed by thick-set hawthorn hedgerows,
the spreading canopies of great-trunked oaks,
fat-uddered cows serenely foraging,
joy-barking collies chasing squirrels and hares.
The olden life of England happens here.
I’ve come now to the citadel of Magdalen,
Jurassic limestone Augustinian cloister,
omphalos of the Greek and Latin classics.
Barbarians assail its ivied walls,
eviscerating Greats; yet still the dons
resuscitate its belletristic heart:
luminous logos—Plato, Aristotle;
mystical mythos—Homer, Ovid, Dante.
I visit George, my academic friend
credentialed in the Ivy League (myself,
a timid tagalong); we are invited
to High Table, feasting on rare beef.
The group around me chuckles at a pun
from Sappho’s Fragment One, and then guffaws
about black-figure satyrs on an Attic krater.
George smiles through eyes myopic and bemused.
The dinner ends. The gracious president
proposes that we view their rarest books.
He guides us through a maze of corridors,
and upstairs to a massive oaken door.
He turns the lock with an immense iron key,
flicks on a wall switch: dim uncertain light.
Like Carter when his torch illuminated
the boy-king’s tomb, I gasp.
the boy-king’s tomb, I gasp. Astounding things!
Sanctum sanctorum, oaken shelves arrayed
with volumes bound in old Morocco leather,
parquet floor to vaulted ribbed stone ceiling.
I have imagined fabled treasure troves:
the library of imperial Byzantium,
Augustine’s writings saved from Vandal hordes,
medieval psalters stored in monasteries.
And now this room: the very stuff of dreams.
Removing a vintage tome, he beckons me
to take it in my hands. I hesitate.
Might not my fingers soil the antique binding?
Trembling, I hold the book, then open it.
I contemplate the curious frontispiece:
engraving framed in knotty filigree,
title in Latin on the facing page,
a date in Roman numerals: 1612.
I pass it back to him, peruse the shelves.
An author: T.E. Lawrence. I inquire
if that’s the famous helper of the Arabs.
Oh yes! This is his first Mideastern journal.
We sponsored him, a Senior Demyship,
he went to Syria. The rest is epic.
I turn the pages, stare at penciled scribblings,
nonsensical or sense I cannot tell.
How strange the wanderings of documents,
the random accidents of preservation.
Both sacred and profane discoveries
are made by genius minds throughout the ages,
preserved in written form; forgotten, lost,
then found again. Through sheer fluke they survive,
the chine of science and philosophy,
a storied past conversing with our present.
.
.
Mary Jane Myers resides in Springfield, Illinois. She is a retired JD/CPA tax specialist. Her debut short story collection Curious Affairs was published by Paul Dry Books in 2018.
Thank you, Mary Jane, for this lovely and evocative poem, bringing a rich experience to life so economically through your well-chosen words. Best wishes, Bruce.
Dear Bruce
Thank you for your kind words.
Most sincerely
Mary Jane
Wow! What an impressive poem of expansive erudite expressions that stun the senses along with the sensitivity and wariness of handling possibly fragile remains of historical epochs. Your poem impacts the mind from auspicious beginning to entrancing end.
Dear Roy
Thank you for your encouraging words! This poem has been in “draft form” for many years. I finally produced a version that I thought might be polished enough to submit for publication!
Most sincerely,
Mary Jane
Mary Jane, you have touched upon one of the most piquant joys of my life — the collection of rare books. I started my collecting at the age of thirteen, when I discovered the first volume of James Northcote’s “Fables (1831) for sale at a run-down curio shop in Queens. The book cost me twenty-five cents. Decades later I found the second volume at the rare editions section of the Strand Bookshop in Manhattan. I paid eighty dollars for it.
Your poem is not just about books, but about the milieu of Oxfordshire — the beauty of the English countryside, the medieval splendor of Oxford’s architecture, the deep but easygoing erudition of the scholars there who can make jokes about puns in Sappho. This is an excellent lead-in to your visit to the “sanctum sanctorum” of the rare book collection.
Such collections are like a time-travelling visit to the past. You can hold in your hands texts that were once in the hands of persons who have been dead for half a millennium. My own collection includes a Latin edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that is from the library of William Wordsworth, a 1502 blackletter edition of St. Augustine’s Opuscula, printed by Jocodus Badius, and the first edition of Niccolo Perotti’s Latin translation of Diogenes Laertius (Hagenau, 1530). All of these were found by pure luck, which is frequently the case in book collecting.
Dear Joseph
What joy rare book collecting must be! And you are fortunate to live in the most erudite metropolis in America, chock-full of treasures.
This last August I traveled in Ireland. In addition to the Book of Kells exhibit at Trinity College, there is currently a special show at the National Museum that showcases early monastic manuscripts: https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Museums/Archaeology/Exhibitions/Words-on-the-Wave-Ireland-and-St-Gallen-in-Early-M How satisfying to be able to examine these precious objects at close view.
One fascinating aspect: scientists are now doing DNA analysis on the vellum of early (e.g. 9th century) manuscripts. The question is: where did the cows come from that supplied the hides from which the vellum was fabricated? The Irish are proud, because some of the these manuscripts now stored in mainland Europe can be authenticated as Irish: the DNA in the vellum definitely is traceable to Irish cows. The Irish monks really did save western civilization!
Most sincerely
Mary Jane
A piece that transports me from the Oxford I was mooching (British meaning) around this summer, to the niches where the rarest of books are reverently kept in the medieval-era colleges.
Thanks for the read, MJ.
Dear Paul
How I envy your summertime Oxford ambles. My local river is the Sangamon, and though its nearby cousin the Spoon was immortalized by Edgar Lee Masters, and while all our little rivers here in central Illinois possess a lovely and languid charm, still they lack the fabled sublimity of the Cherwell and the Isis!
Thank you for your kind words.
Sincerely
Mary Jane
Mary Jane, I love your poem so much, I could almost smell, it!! The leathery, musty smell of old-bound books, which I can also see in my mind’s eye, the sacred room of Oxford’s old books, dimly lit, with a dust column of air where the sun is shining. Rows and rows to the ceiling, with a sliding ladder. I see it all! I also love books, I have had so many in my life that I have had to give away but somehow I have maintained a decent core. My oldest find is an 1882 collection of George Herbert’s The Temple, published in London by the Unwin Brothers. I also used to collect old hymnals, the oldest that I have is a 2.5 x 4 beaten up, tiny leather-bound collection of hymn texts from 1835, published in New Berlin by George Miller. I like your used of blank verse– I have not experimented with this form; when I usually write unrhymed verse it is free verse (believe it or not). But I see the value and validity of blank verse, it keeps some kind of formal rhythmic structure while allowing a more “unfettered” conversational tone, perhaps. Definitely something I want to try in the future. Your poem is a bibliophile’s dream, good work!
Dear Theresa
Thank you so much for your kind comments. I’m so pleased that you enjoy my poem. It was great fun to write. It appears we are fellow members of that quirky little platoon–the “book-loving tribe”!
Re: blank verse. I could never quite master this form, and my lines were “loose”, without my understanding exactly how the meter was supposed to work. Last year, I was privileged to take an on-line class with Dr. James Matthew Wilson at University of St. Thomas, Houston. We used Timothy Steele’s book “all the fun’s in how you say a thing” as our text. Rather than memorizing a myriad of British Oxbridge academic rules, Mr. Steele lays out first the basics of an iambic line, and then the concept of relative stresses, on a scale of one to five. Ah hah! My American-vernacular mind finally grasps the essence of iambs!
Best of luck to you as you experiment with blank verse.
Most sincerely
Mary Jane
A well-articulated poem about discovering preserved antique books through a dear friend. While reading the poem, I was wondering how amazing your visit to Magdalen College was. It is my wish to visit England someday. Thanks for this beautiful poem, Mary Jane.
Dear Shamik
Thank you for your kind comments. My visit indeed was memorable. I send you good wishes that your dream of visiting the green and pleasant land of England may come true someday.
Sincerely
Mary Jane
The entire poem, Mary Jane, is a beautiful series of scenes from “the stuff of dreams” at Oxford. The country landscape around the University town features sights, still contemporary, that bring olden England to the minds of visitors. I mean the cows, usually much farther away, and grouped in larger herds wherever we go in the United States–and the hares, singularly attractive if we can catch a glimpse of one. I have rabbits in the vacant field across the street, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an American hare.
Next comes the college culture to which the diffident visitor certainly needs a friendly guide. You characterize so very well the comfortably erudite persons you met thirty years ago at the Magdalen High Table. To think that each of the colleges had and has its equivalent circle! And sometimes they come together for academic events and for other reasons. My most rewarding Oxford experience was a Corpus Christ procession winding through the town, and stopping at designated halls for some minutes of learned devotional speech, with most of the participants in academic garb.
The rare books, found in expected and surprising places, do indeed enable one to touch the past, and perhaps to leave with the volumes something of your own spirit to be met by the future. The books are not only behind lock and key in an ancient hideaway of each college. I’ve picked them up (18th and 19th century) in the Bodleian student reading rooms. I’ve had them called for at scholar’s desks. I’ve roamed the glass enclosed alcoves with one chair each in the modern temperature-controlled Weston building, which was not built in 1991, but now assembles much of what’s rare from manuscripts on calf-skin to recordings on wire. Thanks for your admirably written recollections that have enabled several of us to recall “a storied past conversing with our present.” And inspired others to enter the dream in anticipation.
Dear Margaret
Thank you for your kind words about my poem. What wonderful experiences you have had. I stayed in Oxford a mere three days, and unfortunately the Bodleian was closed. Someday I hope to return for a good long visit.
Of course, rare books and manuscripts are now being digitized so that we may examine them on-line. However, staring at a computer screen does not equal the thrill of actually seeing and handling them.
Sincerely
Mary Jane