`Like Mercy'

At my suggestion, my former boss at Rice University has been moving through the collected works of Shirley Hazzard – first The Transit of Venus, then The Great Fire, now Greene on Capri: A Memoir. The last recounts Hazzard’s impressions of Graham Greene, whom she and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, met in the late nineteen-sixties while on holiday on Capri. Poetry brought them together -- Robert Browning’s. Ann writes:

“I just read a passage that I thought you'd appreciate. In it, Graham Greene has asked her how she remembers so many poems (he had a similar capacity). She said it mostly happened by itself, she would sometimes read something once, then twice if it moved her, and then would repeat it to herself, not to memorize it, but because she liked it.

“He said that as he grew older, he found that he rarely recalled lines of new poets, even if he liked their work. He said, `I don't think one is so accessible to poems that come after one's own era.’

“She said, `Sensations aroused by poetry are in any case private, intuitive, unaccountable. In the past, poetry had been a presence that cut across the generations and the classes. One never knew where it would turn up. Like mercy.’"

Perhaps Ann ought to start a blog of her own.