His smile, like a half-open door,
Invited entry, to explore
The garden where he grew
Thrift, honesty and rue.
Honour to Dennis Enright, missed
By all rebels who resist
Bombast, the pseudo-fact
The crass, the inexact.
In another poem here, ‘The Seventh Age’, he decides that old men turn into actors; he also suggests desperation, but counsels against that (as would his beloved Horace, whom he also memorably translated). He lists some of the old-man roles — the old soldier, the sly dog, the sage,
The dread nostalgist (ou sont les neiges?)… .
The spry impersonator of the young.
There’s only one role that comes anywhere near
The truth, but don’t attempt it — it’s King Lear.
He seems to have been keen on sages. ‘Warning to All Shipping’ ends:
I dreamed of a mountain, at the top a sage:
I’d climbed to ask him what to do about age.
He answered, ‘Speak less. Simply turn the page’.
Which is what he did, as his illness took hold; became almost a Roman stoic, a Seneca; sitting, smiling, in his neat jacket and trousers, he could have been wearing a toga. There is an ancient classic feel about some of these poems.
Not surprisingly, he seems to have ended where he began. In an early poem, possibly written in his thirties, ‘The End of the Sage’, he quotes the Sage at the end of his life.
‘Much wiser and much dafter
Now that I quite agree
To become dead,
I achieve a witticism,
And I see at last,’ he said,
‘Hazy like foothills possible laughter.’
He used that phrase for the title of his first book of poems, Possible Laughter. Nearly 50 years later, that possibility still hovers, ‘hazy like foothills’, inside these, his Last Poems.
W. H. Auden (an admirer of James) wrote, ‘good poets like bad puns’. James, an inveterate punster, in adversity could be at his lightest and best:
Hospital Joke
Shelley had his little whine
— ‘The superincumbent hours’ —
Mine is life without weather and wine,
Nothing but slops and flowers.
The moral of this verse is:
However dire one’s ills,
Be thankful for small nurses
And blue remembered pills.
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