'Though One Need Not Yet Quite Define Peru'

Readers of English-language poetry asked to produce an allusion to the word Peru would likely come up with the opening couplet in “The Vanity of Human Wishes”(1749), Dr. Johnson’s adaptation of Juvenal's Tenth Satire:

 

“Let Observation with extensive View,    

Survey Mankind, from China to Peru . . .”

 

Why Peru? Johnson recognized a perfect rhyme (and iamb) when he heard one. Coupled with China, the South American country suggests universality spanning the globe. His theme is the vanity of all humans, not the English alone. In a less well-known poem, “Song,” Johnson writes to similar effect:

 

“Not all the gems on India’s shore,

Not all Peru’s unbounded store,

Not all the power, nor all the fame,

That heroes, kings, or poets claim;

Nor knowledge which the learn’d approve,

To form one wish my soul can move.”

 

Europeans first reached what is now Peru around 1524. Within a decade they had conquered the Incan Empire. To eighteenth-century English readers, Peru would have suggested exotic remoteness somewhere across the ocean, a place inhabited by the descendants of Indians and Spaniards. It remains a far-away place even to me, a country I have never visited and know best from the novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, though my wife was born in Lima and my youngest son is posted there with the Peace Corps. I’m more familiar with the birthplace of Cole Porter in Indiana, which is pronounced PEE-roo, with the stress on the first syllable, making it a trochee.

 Herbert Morris titled his second poetry collection Peru (1983), though it contains no poem with that as a title. Rather, here are the eleventh and twelfth of sixteen six-line stanzas in “How to Improve Your Personality”:

 

“. . . speak of the tours conducted through the mind

 of those who wait, of those who cannot wait

 because they do not know what they should wait for,

 of those who will not see Peru again,

 though one need not yet quite define Peru,

 say what it may be to be late, too late

 

“come, at last, to the strangeness closing in,

whether it be darkness or education,

embark on longing as though it were music,

implying what can only be implied,

the matter of the air burdened with roses,

the grammar of the wrist, the ankle’s syntax.”

 

Morris is difficult to quote without losing the larger meaning. He writes dramatic monologues in blank verse. His first six stanzas are one long sentence. The poem deals with a suburban American family with three daughters. I won’t try to paraphrase it, though it’s clear that Morris’ Peru is less a country than a concept, a metaphysical will-o’-the-wisp, forever lost.