The first 21 lines of Catullus’ Song 64, in my translation:

Sprouted at the peak of Mt. Pelion,
the pines, they say, pushed right through Neptune’s waves
to the surf at Phasis, Aeëtes’ realm,
when the hand-picked force, those young oaks of Greece,
wanting to snatch from Colchis the Golden Fleece,
risked riding the salty waves on a ship,
and brushed the sky-blue sea with fir-wood oars.
Athena, who protects their citadel,
invented their light flying vehicle,
weaving the pine boards into one curved keel.

This ship was a first for the sea goddess.
When with its prow it plowed her wind-blown swell,
and its oar strokes sprayed white spume on her waves,
a face arose from the froth-covered strait,
a miracle the sea nymphs marveled at.

This one and many others they beheld,
the mortals, staring in the ocean sun:
nymphs rising out, naked, breasts in the foam.

Then Peleus was on fire for the nymph Thetis.
Then Thetis was not above a human match.
Then even father Jupiter knew it:
she was meant to be wife for Peleus.

(The whole long poem is well translated by Thomas Banks. The Latin I used is here.)

Is autumn the one true season of life?
(Or must a long cold winter follow fall?)
October paints with fragile colors rife

the early twilights, and with black, the nights of strife,
when a suffering wind repeats the call:
“Is autumn the one true season of life?”

Sweet roots and crisp apples under the knife
yield scented juices that summer sun recall.
October paints with fragile colors rife.

With thoughts of fledgling days the small
birds huddle tight as husband clings to wife.
Is autumn the one true season of life?

It is the soft wind whistling like a fife
that spins the dancing leaves, holds them in thrall.
October paints with fragile colors rife.

The vein to the past was cut with a knife.
The days drop like leaves, and ripeness is all.
October paints with fragile colors rife.
Is autumn the one true season of life?

Shaw’s father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son’s body was thrown
and lost with his “niggers.”
–Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

The VFW Commander in his flat Boston voice
intones the names of the dead:
DeStefano, Haratoonian, Donnelly, O’Neil.
Sweating, Buddha-fat babies watch; their
shrunken grandmas sag into low lawn chairs.
The high school band follows the route we have
marked for them. They play like experts, but they can joke,
knowing they have a few years before they sink
into the chairs along the way.
In this town, Lowell checked himself in
to the loony bin
and glimpsed his future in the faces
of the other mental cases.
(Plath too, and Ray Charles.)
Once John Birch HQ, it knows fear.
Cambridge public housing blocks stand in sight: warnings.
The lady selling cones from the ice cream truck
wears a hijab. Belmont’s Finest march to the tune
of Valley Forge, Custer’s ranks,
San Juan Hill and Patton’s tanks.
And the ditch, it comes closer each year.
Blank shots over the town’s war graves.
The bones hear nothing, but the shots and smoke
are for the grandmas, the band, the babies,
for the ravaged veterans of the one war
we all fight alone to the last breath.

Emerson begins his poem “Hamatreya” with a list of names: Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, and the other founders of Concord, Mass. They speak, telling how they made the land theirs, divided it into parcels, and left it to their heirs.

In the second stanza, the earth laughs as these men try to transform her. The narrator says, “The hot owner sees not Death, who adds / Him to his land, a lump of mould the more.” The earth then sings in her own voice: “Mine and yours; / Mine, not yours, Earth endures.” When her song is done, the narrator remarks, “I was no longer brave; / My avarice cooled / Like lust in the chill of the grave.”

That is how Emerson ends. Sixteen decades later, we live not far from Concord. The earth says,

Ralph Waldo is dead, turned to grit and mud.
Eight more generations have wriggled out,
Cried, drunk, grown, worked, shrunk, died since his voice stopped.
To me: a few smooth circuits round the sun.
I’ll still be turning when they all are gone,
When something new crawls on my skin, and then
When nothing stirs, and dawn means plain white light
On silent stone.
But they do swarm on me.
Their houses are like dust, but thick dust now.
My hills are hard to notice from their car
Windows as they fly down tarmac ribbons,
Burning carbon they draw from inside me.
I whose motion is endless, effortless
Salute their grim, relentless harvesting.
What are they to me? Just some of my mass,
Quivering briefly on my dry surface.
Yet when I ask what they are, what I am,
What each is for, I find I use their words.
They taught me my Concord was beautiful,
Its misty lowlands and its pale green hills.
If they asphyxiate or cook themselves,
Who will remember the Concord they found?
I am no longer brave.

Half an hour before the concert starts, I watch the audience file in. The average age is well above seventy; the husbands look slight and bleached beside their wives. A few grandchildren wearing bows and shiny shoes sit between the couples. In the hangings of the Tapestry Room, Renaissance grandees display their courtly manners. Behind me, someone says, “We used to see Archie Cox there all the time.”

I try to read Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, her farm-girl narrator describing a commuter flight to Green Bay: “Then suddenly we were taking off, racing down the runway and lifting into the air like a carnival ride, the plane with a seabird’s wobble.” It’s her first time in an airplane. Near me, a voice asks, “Did you go to any concerts in Paris?” Answer: “We heard the St. John’s Passion, of which we are very fond.” Apparently, we are not so fond of dangling prepositions.

Moore’s leisurely, descriptive style encourages observation. I remember the tiled floor in this very room from when I first saw it, on a trip with my Dad, at age 17. The Bach-lover behind me is recommending the “film version of Cyrano with Depardieu.” Each French noun is perfectly pronounced, like an excerpt from a language tape. His mouth is capable of switching from Boston Brahmin to gallic r’s and back without slowing appreciably.

My misanthropy now covers the whole audience except maybe the grandchildren. The first piece of music is supposed to rebuke such attitudes. It is a Masonic cantata by Mozart, with German lyrics that recommend: “Love thyselves and thy brothers! Bodily strength and beauty be thy ornament!” I find this advice hard to take, even with Mozart’s sugar-coating.

It’s the Bartok that snaps me out of it, the string quartet exchanging spiky, stochastic phrases, snatches of folk melody, tragic outbursts. The musicians are young, diverse, and intent, interacting with their bodies and faces as well as the sounds they make. The music was new when the audience first heard it and feels new still. It puts up green shoots.