'The Blameless Life'

How pleasing to learn that friends, seemingly unknown to each other -- compartmentalized as friendships often are -- intersected before we knew either of them. Sixteen years ago today, the late D.G. Myers published on his Commonplace Blog thirteen epigrams written more than twenty-five years earlier. I had no idea David had written poetry. The publisher of the 1984 chapbook A Patch of Weeds was R.L. Barth. The poems suggested how much the two writers had in common, besides a tartly satirical voice and a taste for epigrams – Martial, J.V. Cunningham, Dr. Johnson, Robert Herrick. Here is David’s rendering of Martial’s 3.71: 

“I know, yes. How? I didn’t read your mind.

He’s sore between the legs and you, behind.”

 

And here is Bob’s version of the same poem, included in his recently published Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026):

 

“Naevolus, your boy’s ass is sore; your prick is too.

Although I am no seer, I know just what you do.”

 

Here is David’s “To J.V. Cunningham,” about the poet and scholar David studied under at Washington University in 1976:

 

“Take these, the work of quiet days,

In place of what I owe you—measured praise.

As you have made my mind your own device

To honor you I epigrammatize.”

 

And here is David’s “Dr. Johnson on the Death of His Mother” (Idler, 41):

 

“If you have tears, whoever you may be,

Enough to drop for mourners filing by,

Then let this train be your last cause for grief:

The last steps of an inoffensive life.”

 

David died of cancer on September 26, 2014 at age sixty-one. Johnson writes in the Idler essay cited by David:

 

"The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour tended, is a state of dreary desolation in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.”