Daryl Hine

Perpetua Dormienda

Another day, another power outage

Rolled across the sky and through the dawn,

Bringing as well obscurity and outrage,

Thousands of darkened houses and big trees down.

 

Another and another and another

Circuit failure, when the borrowed power

Of the storm, lightning's domestic brother,

Flickered and fell to bits hour after hour!

 

This morning has been as if it not had been,

The world scrubbed clean, the sky a spotless blue,

And all the pointless vacancy between,

Not so much lived as thoughtlessly slept through.

 

-Daryl Hine

 

Daryl Hine (1936-2012) was a Canadian poet born in British Columbia. He got a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, was the editor of Poetry magazine for a decade, and taught at various Chicago area universities. He lived in the Chicago area with his partner, Samuel Todes, a professor of philsosophy at Northwestern University.

 

A Reliquary and Other Poems was Hine's last book and came out in 2013 after his death. 'Perpetua dormienda' - 'to be slept forever', roughly - is an allusion to Catullus 5, the one that begins, "Let us live, Lesbia, and let us love" and ends in an uncountable number of kisses. Lines 5 and 6, though, remind us, "quum semel occidit brevis lux/nox est perpetua una dormienda." Peter Green translates as: "once our brief life's quenched, there's only/one unending night that's left to sleep through." But Hine is not (quite?) feeling so dark as all that: the storm has left "the world scrubbed clean, the sky a spotless blue," and while the morning may have been lost 'thoughtlessly' that doesn't sound necessarily so bad.

 

I've been meaning to post a Daryl Hine poem for a while, and I pulled a book off the shelf this evening, and this was the page it opened at. (Sortes Vergilianae!) We had a serious storm recently, with golf ball sized hail and 'big trees down,' so it seemed to fit. Our power was out for about ten hours, but was back by the following morning, so I couldn't (alas!) sleep it entirely away.