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Rare Books
—Magdalen College, Oxford, November 1991
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 Paul, 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.
Paul 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.
.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!