Donald Davie’s hand-annotated copy of Smart’s Song to David (e.d. J.B. Broadbent) is on my shelf; the annotations I might return to, but as a critical response to poet-critic Davie’s scholarly and informal reception of poet Smart’s critical-creative honoring of the Pslamist, some verses of my own. Feeling these to be critical, prosaic, and distinctly different in aspiration and pitch from the poems I’ve written for myself, I do not consider it a violation of the unspoken self-imposed rule that the blog be criticism first and last.
What did Davie think that night
when enthusiasm
crept and he sat to write
in margins, and the spasm
of fact, word, and graceful
metric could not
prevent his baleful
knowing what Smart knew hot
hell to be: the diverse
voice made too diverse, lost
in its echoes, the curse
of too, too many blessings blessed, the cost
of finding salvation in every limb
of every tree, cat, dog,
and fish, and judgment like a whim,
barked out in the fog?
All this the Psalmist
subdued, Smart admiring
the strength he missed
when wracked by conspiring
pains: reproach of number
set in love against infinity;
sublime grammar roused from slumber,
set to common speech.
Davie feeling
he could do no better
than read till reeling
drunk by the letter
of the verse, of the man
whose life was damned
more strangely than
most others, passionately scanned:
Adoration in each note;
Adoration in the pause
of the comma in the throat;
Adoration dwelling in the dwelling in a clause.
Critical Provisions 