What Oxford means
by Paul Monk
Young friend abroad of closely mentored mind,
What joy it was, in my declining state,
To visit you at Oxford and to find
The niche you’ve found in learning’s old estate.
I’d come from Paris, in a long tradition,
Fresh from conversations with a sage
Of my own vintage and o’erripe condition,
About the world and our advancing age.
Arriving at the station, where you waited,
Recalled to mind my early journeys there:
An impecunious grad, exasperated
By his lack of means, but set to dare
The secret world to hold his probes at bay,
To find and chatter with a gifted friend,
An Arabist Rhodes scholar who, today,
Is our ambassador, Allah forfend,
To Israel, just as the Gaza war
And all the machinations of Iran
Have opened an apocalyptic door
To total chaos in the world of man.
And, later, as an exiled China hand,
Who’d probed the secret world and left again,
To speak with some he thought might understand
His disillusion and his numbing pain.
But all of that was long before your time,
Last century, in fact, antiquity,
Prior to my bootstrapped, epic climb
To the private heights of poetry.
When did we first meet? At Base Camp Three?
Less than halfway to the mountain peak?
Even so, you seemed to see in me
Some Mallory, determined he would seek
The summit of all things, in face of death,
Scornful of the compromising kind
Of hollow men, forever short of breath,
Who hardly seek and, therefore, never find
Those pinnacles of ice, those lofty views
That our poetic souls most hunger for,
Who, consequently, have no active use
For prosody or for the secret door
That all Romantics stubbornly conceive
As waiting for them, given that they yearn
For deep initiation and believe
That entrée will be gifted, if they learn
To read the Noldorin, above the gate,
Carved in runes by Narvi, long ago;
To comprehend it rightly and translate
Its common Elven magic, as you know
Into the simple phrase, ‘Say friend and enter’
As I pointed out, at Tolkien’s pub,
Which stands, in our time, somewhere near the centre
Of the Oxford of our meeting. There’s the rub.
Uncannily, that winter afternoon,
You mistranslated it, as Gandalf had
Misreading it, beneath the Hollin Moon,
As ‘Speak, friend’, not as ‘Say ‘friend’, lad.
But you, of course, had said ‘friend’ from the start,
Booked me into Christ Church, guided me
To hidden treasures, beauties at the heart
Of where we were: the Picture Gallery,
The sheer abundance Blackwells still displays,
The ancient streets and, lastly, the Great Hall,
Where the shade of Harry Potter plays,
Beneath the august portraits on the wall.
Yet that was just the prelude to a day –
December fifth – so full of incident,
So rich, so varied, it will surely stay
With each of us, as was our shared intent.
We strolled The Meadow, up before the Sun,
Took breakfast and recorded, before lunch
A podcast covering the darkened run
Of world affairs, the dismal bunch
Of autocrats and kleptocrats and fools
Who now afflict our much-loved Middle-earth,
Of how an ordered liberty unspools,
And what the public thing is truly worth.
We strolled through cloisters, gazed at chapels,
In Oxford’s fabled colleges, then went
To Blackwells, once again, where I picked apples:
Three delightful books, my pounds well spent –
Judi Dench’s decades in Shakespeare,
Cat Bohannon’s Eve, exploring how
From ancient roots, a woman could appear
As co-evolved with males as she does now,
But chiefly Wilson’s flowing Iliad
To stand beside my Fagles and my Green -
The older, male translations, which I’ve had
As treasured classics, having always been
As testified to, in our interview,
A hoplite spirit, as regards the past,
A Socrates of sorts, both staunch and true,
Sceptical, but ready to stand fast.
Our long-planned lunch, at the Ashmolean,
High above Arundel’s stunning set
Of ancient marbles, glorifying man,
Befitted two quite Rilkean souls, and yet
We rounded out the day, this was your gift,
With Mozart, with Vivaldi and with Bach,
In concert, which, of course, could only lift
One’s mind, one’s spirit, to the splendid arc
Our kind has cast across the world of Being,
Its most transcendent, most astonishing
Leaps of feeling, shaping, loving, seeing
What can be made of almost anything.
What, beneath that arc, are we to say
Of how we saw the storied Bodleian,
Or the Oxford Union, which, in its day
Has harboured all opinions known to man?
Or what shall we profess about the hour
We passed, where Lewis Carroll, long ago,
Conceived the door and tree that would empower
The tale of wondrous Alice we both know?
Just this: that all these moments we have shared
Could only have occurred against two things:
The fact that you and I both truly cared
What Oxford’s been, what being with it brings.
We’re not Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte,
The dissipated toffs of Evelyn Waugh.
We’re auto-poets now, in our own right.
That’s what our time at Oxford means, at core.
