Robert Fitzgerald on Dudley Fitts (#poem)

 

Dudley Fitts

for C.H.F.

The organist has closed his instrument

After recessional, and closed his book;

Counterpoint that his fingers undertook

Into the world of light has made ascent.

Airy agilities for perfection spent

Have quieted at last, but not the look

From the musician's eyes that will not brook

A blundering word upon a great event.

Far from New England's leafiness I write

In that land of the old latinity

And golden air to which at length he came,

My master and friend, as to his own birthright.

What farther land he found I hope to see

When by my change our evenings are the same.

-Robert Fitzgerald

Robert Fitzgerald (1910-1985) is best known as a translator, largely from Latin and Greek. (Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, among others.) But he was a poet in his own right. Dudley Fitts, (1903-1968) was also a translator and poet. Fitzgerald had Dudley Fitts as an instructor at Choate as a teenager; they later went on to cooperate on several translations from Euripides and Sophocles. 

Dudley Fitts was also an organist.

C.H.F. will be Dudley Fitts' wife--or, I suspect, widow, though I'm not entirely sure when this poem was written--Cornelia Hewitt Fitts.

New Directions didn't feel the need to do anything fancy with the cover to sell this book, did they?