'Backward-Looking, Haphazard, Unscholarly'

Patrick Leigh Fermor takes the title of his first travel memoir, A Time of Gifts (1977), from the final stanza of Louis MacNeice’s “Twelfth Night” (Holes in the Sky, 1948): 

“For now the time of gifts is gone –

O boys that grow, O snows that melt,

O bathos that the years must fill --

Here is dull earth to build upon

Undecorated; we have reached

Twelfth Night or what you will . . . you will.”

 

In the book’s third chapter, “Into High Germany,” Leigh Fermor recounts how, at age eighteen in 1933, he occupied himself while hiking across Europe: “On straight stretches of road [in Swabia] where the scenery changed slowly, singing often came to the rescue; and when songs ran short, poetry.” I suspect this is a common practice. I’ve always done it while hiking or even just walking the dog down the block. The rhythm energizes us and compliments our gait. Even stationary labor is enhanced by song, inducing a sense of self-forgetting. My first job, at age twelve, was working in a carwash owned by a friend of my father. I stood under the blowers and toweled off the passing cars. It was tedious, noisy work, and I sang to myself to pass the time. So did another guy I worked with, an old black man named Elijah Waters. When I wasn’t singing I would listen to him.

 

Leigh Fermor calls his repertoire of songs and poems “a private anthology.” It consisted, he writes, “of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.” He notes that when young, memorization comes effortlessly, and devotes almost four pages to recalling his “playlist”: Shakespeare, of course; Marlowe, Spenser, Keats, “the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge.” In other words, most of the same poets I grew up reading but not always committing to memory. Like me, “a great deal of Kipling,” whose poems are enduringly song-like. Think of “Danny Deever.” He retained much of Housman.

 

Leigh Fermor’s list is many times longer than mine, and he includes poems in French, Latin and Greek. He mentions no Americans and explicitly excludes Eliot and Pound. I have some of both – the latter against my better judgment. Then Robinson, Frost and Tate. Among more recent poets, even great ones, only scraps, no complete poems, not even Auden or Larkin. Leigh Fermor comments on his reservoir of verse:

 

“A give-away collection. . . . backward-looking, haphazard, unscholarly . . . But there are one or two beams of hope, and I feel bound to urge in self-defence that Shakespeare, both in quantity and addiction, overshadowed all the rest of this rolling stock.”