`Things One Must Not Leave Undone'

Today we are in Austin to watch my oldest son run his first marathon. Few settings could be more alien but I’m curious to see how Josh will run 26 miles, 385 yards. He’s twenty-nine, and started running only a year ago, but is gifted with an ironclad work ethic. If he does something, he does it. No skimping, no half-measures, no distractions. I wish I had been like that at twenty-nine. The run in Austin reminds me of a poem by Guy Davenport -- “At Marathon” (Thasos and Ohio: Poems and Translations 1950-1980, 1986) -- just as Josh reminds me of Pheidippides, who ran from Marathon to Athens to announce the victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C.:

“Marianne Moore saluted the battlefield.

Her frail hand at the brim of her hat

round as a platter, she stood at attention

in her best Brooklyn Navy Yard manner,

or as years before she and Jim Thorpe

raised the school flag at Carlisle.

Here in long scarlet cloaks the ranks

advanced with ashlared shields, singing

to the thrashed drums and squealing fife

the pitiless hymn of Apollo the Wolf,

spears forward, horsetails streaming

from the masked helmets with unearthly eyes.

The swordline next and the javelineers,

More red cloaks, Ares wild in their blades.

The javelins whistled up like partridges

flushed in a brake and fell like sleet.

The Persians bored in, an auger of hornets.

The Greeks flowed around their thrust

as fire eats a stick. Wise to the ruse,

the Persians pulled back to the sea

and made hard in their ships for Athens,

which, the Greek army there on the plain,

lay naked to their will, tomorrow’s victory.

But the Greeks were there on the morrow

to cut them back. They had run all the way

from Marathon, twenty miles, in bronze.

Two thousand, four hundred and fifty-five

years ago. There are things one must not

leave undone, such as coming from Brooklyn

in one’s old age to salute the army

at Marathon. What are years?”

Moore visited Greece in 1962 with her Bryn Mawr classmates Frances and Norvelle Browne. She stopped at Marathon. Davenport would admire the reverence of such a gesture. He refers in his final line to Moore’s poem “What Are Years?” in which she says “how pure a thing is joy. / This is mortality, / this is eternity.”