Collected Earlier Poems

T H E  C O M P L E T E  T E X T S  O F

THE HARD HOURS

MILLIONS OF STRANGE SHADOWS

THE VENETIAN VESPERS

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright © 1990 by Anthony E. Hecht

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

Originally published in 3 volumes by Atheneum Publishers.

Poems from these 3 volumes were originally published in the following:

The American Scholar, Antaeus, Book Week, Botteghe Oscure, Encounter, Georgia Review, Harpers, Harpers Bazaar, Harvard Advocate, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Marxist Perspectives, The Nation, New American Review, The New Leader, The New Republic, New Statesman, The New Yorker, The Noble Savage, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Quarterly Review of Literature, Times Literary Supplement, Transatlantic Review, Voices
, and
Wild Places
.

“The Seven Deadly Sins” and “Improvisations on Aesop” were originally published by The Gehenna Press, with wood engravings by Leonard Baskin.

Acknowledgment to George Dimock, Jr., and William Arrowsmith for assistance in translating the chorus from Sophocles’
Oedipus at Kolonos
.

The translation of Voltaire’s “Poem Upon the Lisbon Disaster” originally appeared in a limited edition published by The Penmaen Press.

“Green: An Epistle” was the Phi Beta Kappa poem for Swarthmore in 1971; “The Odds” was the Phi Beta Kappa poem for Harvard in 1975.

“The Venetian Vespers” appeared first in book form in a limited edition published by David R. Godine. Copyright © 1979 by Anthony E. Hecht.

The versions of the two poems of Joseph Brodsky were made for his book of poems,
A Part of Speech
, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1980. Copyright © 1979 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

v3.1

               Were is that lawhing and that song

               That trayling and that proude gong
,

                  Tho havekes and tho houndes?

                        Al that joye is went away,

                        That wele is comen to weylaway,

                  To manye harde stoundes.

In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur,

I had a vision once—though you understand

It was nothing at all like Dante’s, or the visions of saints,

And perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some friends,

Picking my way through a warm sunlit piazza

In the early morning. A clear fretwork of shadows

From huge umbrellas littered the pavement and made

A sort of lucent shallows in which was moored

A small navy of carts. Books, coins, old maps,

Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints

Were all on sale. The colors and noise

Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation,

So that even the bargaining

Rose to the ear like a voluble godliness.

And then, when it happened, the noises suddenly stopped,

And it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved

And even the great Farnese Palace itself

Was gone, for all its marble; in its place

Was a hill, mole-colored and bare. It was very cold,

Close to freezing, with a promise of snow.

The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap

Outside a factory wall. There was no wind,

And the only sound for a while was the little click

Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet.

I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,

But no other sign of life. And then I heard

What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed;

At least I was not alone. But just after that

Came the soft and papery crash

Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.

And that was all, except for the cold and silence

That promised to last forever, like the hill.

Then prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored

To the sunlight and my friends. But for more than a week

I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen.

All this happened about ten years ago,

And it hasn’t troubled me since, but at last, today,

I remembered that hill; it lies just to the left

Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy

I stood before it for hours in wintertime.

Third Avenue in sunlight. Nature’s error.

Already the bars are filled and John is there.

Beneath a plentiful lady over the mirror

He tilts his glass in the mild mahogany air.

I think of him when he first got out of college,

Serious, thin, unlikely to succeed;

For several months he hung around the Village,

Boldly T-shirted, unfettered but unfreed.

Now he confides to a stranger, “I was first scout,

And kept my glimmers peeled till after dark.

Our outfit had as its sign a bloody knout,

We met behind the museum in Central Park.

Of course, we were kids.” But still those savages,

War-painted, a flap of leather at the loins,

File silently against him. Hostages

Are never taken. One summer, in Des Moines,