You Were There, and other poems - 10. A person's nature

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Poem No. 27

Tanka:

All this restlessness

– Like a place a ghost has claimed –

Leaves no room for peace,

But churns alone in myself

The could-have-beens that haunt me.

Poem No. 28 ^[7]

Ascanio mourns within his head.

His open-phrased desire

Reaches yet as fresh today

As it did when first he sang

Of fair-virtued Silvia.

And Silvia sweet, her confusion bearing

Her young father’s pain,

Her music crying the tears

The boy composer shed o’er

Sweet Thomas’ picture.

How they sing, like hurting analogy

Of confession and feelings

No sincerity said was true,

But they knew the virtue of it,

The relentless cruelty

Of those who say no.

Ascanio mourns

and Silvia sweetly

draws us into

an artist’s tear

for Thomas’ parting.

Poem No. 29

Tanabata

In the dark stillness of night

where the tips of magpie wings

bridge the span of the sky,

and on the ground, the dew turned frost

threatens to be dew once more,

only then,

can they meet

and celestial white robes

cross the bridge to touch

a husband to his wife again.

Poem No. 30

A person’s will

Is no match

For a person’s nature.

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[7] “Ascanio mourns within his head” This poem contains two subjects: Mozart’s festa teatrale “Ascanio in Alba,” and the inner life of the boy of fifteen who wrote it.

One of the most intense and intimate relationships of the composer’s life is documented by the teenboy’s father, who wrote of it to his wife back in Salzburg. For in their travels to Milan, where Mozart would compose the pastoral wedding opera of Ascanio, he reunited with Thomas Linley, Jr., another fifteen-year-old musical prodigy on tour he’d met the previous year in Italy. Thomas’ father also recorded the love the two young men formed for one another, writing back to London how Thomas was inconsolable for weeks after the boys had to part ways. Leopard Mozart noted how the pair sobbed and had to be pried apart when it was time for father and son to board their coach back to Austria.

Si, ma d’un altro amore

sento la fiamma in petto

e l'innocente affetto

solo a regnar non è.

(Giuseppe Parini,

«Ascanio in Alba» I, iv)

[Yes, the flame of another love

Has set my heart on fire.

It is no innocent affection

That now reigns in me.]

(AC Benus, translator)

https://youtu.be/vJwvm-jMFjc

The concluding line of the poem’s second stanza makes reference to a few years later in Mozart’s life, for when he heard that his first love had tragically died at the age of 22, in 1778, Mozart openly wept over the portrait Thomas had given him when they were both fifteen years old.

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