Poesis

IMAGINE A COLLEGE so sensible as to have a freshman course in "Music and Poetry" taught by the man who wrote "Dartmouth Undying." Imagine Orpheus, in the guise of Franklin McDuffee, entering with an armload of books and seating himself at a beat-up grand piano.

Once, when I had poems to show him, and had sufficiently pestiferized him, he invited me to an evening in his digs on Occom Ridge. I remember a lofty tower room, books and records everywhere, a fire in the grate. An English bulldog (named Peter Pan) inspected me, and my host—tall, shy, with wavy hair and joshing eyes—brought me mulled red wine. It did little to improve my ballad of a bell buoy, which he read aloud. One fragment I remember: So I sing as I swing Through the rising waves and long For the same sails that came Oft before to hear my song.

Pretty gruesome. Bell buoys don't riff around like that. They creak and clunk on rusty hinges and now and then sound their melancholy clanging.

Franklin didn't need to say much. He knew I was in a Laocoonian struggle with the obvious. Instead he read Tennyson's "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," with bells everywhere tolling over the sounds of carriages and the solemnities of London in mourning. (This poem was also overwritten.) And he read from "The Princess," a duet of pure light and pure sound, and then from "Ulysses," that remarkable fugue of spirit and old age.

I hiked home awhirl. Lying down on my bed in New Hampshire Hall, I began to laugh and laugh.

"What the hell's so funny?" growled my brother Steve, promptly going back to sleep.

I couldn't have told him. I didn't know myself, only that something inside me was all lit up, and was much stronger than the wine.

Nor could I have guessed that even the masters fall to the serpents. Seven years hence our immortal Franklin McDuffee, finding his Orpheus departing, would quench the remainder in monoxide.

Franklin McDuffee