THE GENERATIONS

9 9 R T H E G E N E R A T I O N S J E F F R E Y H A R R I S O N Years from now I may have forgotten all the details, so I’m trying to get this down on paper now in order to have it then when I’m old and looking back on that evening of the poetry festival’s last day when Wilbur and Snodgrass and Strand were all in one room for what might be the last time, with a slew of us likely to be forgotten sitting around that living room or standing along its bookshelved walls and in the doorways, listening to toasts and then to our spirited host intoning Yeats’s ‘‘Sailing to Byzantium.’’ Then we heard Wyatt, Herrick, Bishop, Larkin, and I’m already forgetting who else, nursery rhymes in English and Hungarian, all by heart from those in our gathering, poem after poem called back and delivered and listened to with the insuppressible pleasure of poets celebrating the art of those who came centuries or decades before them. I can’t remember, already, who asked for Wilbur’s ‘‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.’’ He said he couldn’t do it from memory, and someone handed him the book. As he read it from his armchair, I could see Strand, standing behind him, on the far side of the room, mouthing the words as if they were a creed – then he backed away, though I could see him still from my corner as he bent his head forward 1 0 0 Y and covered his face with his hands. For a moment I thought he was overcome with emotion, and maybe, for a moment, he was – at the poem itself, and from remembering the time (from the vantage of now being seventy-three) he’d memorized those lines by his elder. And not just those lines, because, moments later, he stepped forward to recite another poem by Wilbur, following it with a parody he’d written in college, then placed his hand on Wilbur’s shoulder to show him it was meant in further homage. And I felt how rare it was, this paying tribute, this camaraderie, this sense of being however small a part of something much larger than that room. ...