The Lost Books

I have read them all, the lost books:

Homer’s Margites,Confucius’s Book of Music,

Love’s Labour’s Won and Byron’s Memoirs,

The burnt plays of Aeschylus and Dead Souls Part Two...


No words you will ever read could be as marvellous

As those, forever invisible,

Wyverns and griffons in the ether.


Literature began with a savage laugh.

Margites the human monster, the absurd puppet,

Blunders along, ignorant and inept,

A fool worthy of his own epic,

Still amusing the blind old entertainer in his old age.


The silent voices cry out

Like the two hundred and sixty Confucian scholars

Buried alive on the orders of the Emperor Shih-huang-ti

To prevent them from reconstructing the classics from memory.


One thinks of the precious box of papers

Flaubert buried in his garden at Croisset

As the Prussian army advanced across France;

Letters ,notes and drafts for unwritten works,

Perhaps the proposed satire on socialism

Or his Second Empire novel.


And Rimbaud’s notebook,

Misplaced by the friend to whom it was entrusted,

With fifty or sixty unpublished poems,

The only one of which he could recall

"Something about geese and ducks

Splashing around in a pond.”