| Copyright
1971 by John Van Sickle. From a brochure printed at The Third & Elm Press, Newport, Rhode Island. |
W. Antony
The Arminarm Eclogues with the Hexercises (for the Heclogues) Pieces |
The Poet |
W. Antony is a nom de guerre of David Mus.
His other poems have appeared in Poetry and in The Young American
Poets, an anthology edited by Paul Carroll.... David Mus was a student
and Junior Fellow at Harvard. He now lives in a small village in Burgundy
where he wrote the Arminarm Eclogues. [The bibliography has subsequently grown to include numerous works in English, in French, & in both tongues, among them The Essays (Instrumentum Litterarum 5, Rome 1987): "New Readings in The Wasteland (1972), "Une « Odyssée» bien francaise" (1983), "Notes for the Wordsworths and Coleridge" (1970), & "Tunnelling out of Virgil" (1980) in response to The Design of Virgil's Bucolics (Rome 1978) by John Van Sickle.] |
From a letter |
To be modern to the full received its warrant in
Virgil... continuity with the past sanctioning the radically new. Pastoral as I understand it, not the Arcadian paradings from Marot through Sidney and the rest down to Collins... My myth of a myth... Perseus... his story would underlied the rest and stand for story.... I took, not the whole myth, but three major episodes: the birth of the (poetic) hero, in a shower of rain; the decapitation of Medusa in the garden; and the rescuing of the abandoned Beauty. These are hinted at, dramatized, or searched for in many of the poems. To encounter »nature« we move »out« to it -- into battle, or into a parkland - and return from it to our urban abstractions. This rhythmic penetration and withdrawal is the form of our contact with the concrete. Each of my eclogues was to illustrate it in the form of the »story«, the verse, or the page. David Mus |
The Edition |
The first edition of The Arminarm
Eclogues with the Hexercises has been published by John Van Sickle and
Giulia Battaglia at La Quercia (Viterbo), Italy. The edition comprises two
hundred copies, each having fifty-four leaves (24 cm by 34 cm) sewn and
bound in Murillo paper from Fabriano. One-hundred-eighty copies
are printed on white Ingres paper from Fabriano and are numbered
1 throug 189. Twenty copies, number I through XX, are printed on hand-made
paper Roma from Fabriano in the colors green Veronese for
the Eclogues and yellow Giotto for the Hexercises.
The colors are those of the poet's original version [mimeographed sheets
in a gray folder]. |
Publisher's Note |
On first encounter, The Arminarm Eclogues
were unsettling. Not what I expected of poetry, let alone of pastoral, they
were also difficult, yet a presence that could not be dismissed. They provoked
a new reading of ancient pastoral -- Virgil and Theocritus -- a review of
pastoral tradition. As longer acquaintance made them allies and friends, the idea grew on me that they should be published, if only to challenge the view that pastoral poetry is dead. They evoked the tradition of harmonious bucolic society yet also the more complex strains in pastoral -- war, sexuality, poetic challenge (hence the title, Arminarm, both harmony, »arm-in-arm«, and militant »arms«). In their own way, these »modern eclogues« renewed the pastoral emulation of epic and old contest with history and love. |
The Close of the Book |
Instead of Virgil's ten eclogues, the present book has nine, omitting the fourth -- his famous »Messianic« poem instructing a new-born hero to start at once to bring world peace. The book quotes Virgil's fourth eclogue, but only at the close, in an Appendix in archaistic style, where the hero -- Imbry Miles -- is a child but led apart from history to a garden: |
| ...si qua manent sceleris vestigia nostri inrita perpetua solvent formidine terras |
[...if any traces
of our crime remain cancelled they will loose the lands from endless fright.] |
| My mews is cobbled now, but at its end The dark green gates their kingdoms still defend From foreign broils, the jar of men and states, The violence which Glory incarnates; Here's peopled peace, Lady Winchilsea's garden, The shaded, leafy theatre of Arden; There sits Ardelia battling with her pen,, There frays the world, there knits it up again; There blooms of every color known to man With those unknown contend upon her fan, There jewels myriad by a plashy brink Catch their Ardelia's sparkling gaze, and wink; Of all the feathery nation, there's the elite, Canary's gold, the talk of parakeet, An owl's eyes starting from a peacock's tail, Tame shrikes, and, on a leash, a nightingale. There was little Imbry led each nightfall To where Ardelia reigned with parasol, And reads him what she wrote last week, and this, With passages from Job and Genesis, And daily laughs among her thornless roses, Proving the childish theorems he poses: »When Adam names the beasts, is all the world A garden, or a garden all the world?« |