“Thurn” is not an English word. Thurn und Taxis was a German noble
family that was prominent in the 16th century German postal service—which
I first read about long ago in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, an odd, short, and really cool novel that
actually engages with postal service intrigue in 16th century Europe,
of all things, though there’s more to it than that. The Thurn und Taxis family grew
into a long-lived line of German nobility and built a number of castles with
their wealth. Thurn was a German
variant of the Italian torre, for “tower,”
and the details of the poem would seem lend credence to “tower” as the definition:
It’s a meditation on death and legacy in contemplation of a marble grave marker
in a place with many of them. More to the point, though, is who is lying
beneath the grave marking the elegy?
The mention of the “Abbey” and the
mention of Ben Johnson, and another Johnson, (maybe James Johnson, soldier and “Governor”
of Quebec [he commanded the garrison for a time in the 1700s], or perhaps
William Johnson, Sub-Almoner to King Charles II)—all three Johnsons interred in
Westminster Abbey—place this poem in contemplation of somebody’s memorial in
Westminster Abbey. It’s driving me crazy, but I cannot find a reference to who it is. My best guess, but who I
think it must be, is that it’s T.S. Eliot, who died in 1965, and whose stone
in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey was unveiled in January, 1967. That’s the
right time frame, and the references to the person’s “grandeur & mettle”
seems to help (Eliot was a grand figure and probably mettlesome too, literarily
speaking), and the repetition of “tiresome” in the 3rd stanza helps
as well. Eliot’s is a poetry of magnificent exhaustion as much as anything, a
modernist who dramatized the decline and dissolution of Western society’s
strength, virility, relevance, and outright viability.
A thurn, then, is a tower, and
the poem is an ode to the passing of a towering figure.
(This is a short post, but I’ve never
had to work harder to unpuzzle a Dream Song, and I’m still not convinced beyond
all doubt. I’m utterly exhausted…. In the words of Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock: “I
grow old ... I grow old ... / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”)
No comments:
Post a Comment