Today’s Poem: Where Is the Pious Doer?
Elizabeth Bridges Daryush and the medieval Persian lyric
from Sonnets from Hafez
by Elizabeth Bridges
31 Where is the pious doer? & I the estray’d one, where? Behold how far the distance, from his safe home to here! Dark is the stony desert, trackless & vast & dim, Where is hope’s guiding lantern? Where is faith’s star so fair? My heart fled from the cloister, & chant of monkish hymn, What can avail me sainthood, fasting & punctual prayer? What is the truth shall light me to heav’n’s strait thoroughfare? Whither, O heart, thus hastest? Arrest thee & beware! See what a lone adventure is thine unending quest! Fraught with what deadly danger! Set with what unseen snare! Say not, O friend, to Hafez, “Quiet thee now & rest!” Calm & content, what are they? Patience & peace, O where?
That Elizabeth Bridges Daryush (1887–1977) became a poet has a certain ring of inevitability, even if it wasn’t inevitable. Daughter of the poet Robert Bridges (1844–1930), British poet laureate from 1913 until his death, she was certainly in the right current to inherit a gift and bent for verse. It doesn’t always run in families, of course, but sometimes it does. Witness the Victorian Rossettis, for example, and more recently, the father-son Pulitzer-Prize winning American poets, James (1927–1980) and Franz (1953–2015) Wright. Poetry isn’t genetic, except when it is.
As a poet, Elizabeth Daryush remains a figure about whom critics seem to struggle to find something nice to say. The Scottish poet and critic Don Paterson (b. 1963), for example, who included her sonnet “Still Life” in his 101 Sonnets from Shakespeare to Heaney, remarks in his note on the poem that the privileged scene it describes, of a young heiress coming in to breakfast and opening her morning mail, is one that you “want to go after with a cricket bat.”
Despite her reputation a formal innovator, particularly in syllabic verse, and the critiques of upper-class life that occupy her mature work, other writers have made much of her as a poet of archaisms, determined to be The Thing That Modernism Forgot. The American poet John Matthias (b. 1941), for example, characterizes Daryush as “someone who has suddenly stepped out of the wrong century to find herself at the wrong party wearing the wrong clothes. There she stands in her brocades speaking her o’ers and ’twixts and ’tweens in her very proper accent.”
We might well ask whether there’s anything wrong with having a “very proper” accent, and remark that poetry is democratic, except when it isn’t. Meanwhile, Daryush was championed by such notable poet-critics as Donald Davie (1922–1995), who wrote the introduction to her 1976 Collected Poems, and John Finlay (1941–1991), who remarked that only readers whose vision was hampered by the revolutionary “Pound-Eliot” stylistic lens would fail to find virtue in her work.
In 1923, Elizabeth Bridges married a Persian government official, Ali Akbar Daryush, whom she had met in 1915, while he was a student at Oxford. Whether the two had met over a mutual interest in medieval Persian poetry, or whether Daryush had introduced Elizabeth Bridges to his native literary tradition, by 1921 their relationship had developed to the point of her dedicating to him a collection, Sonnets from Hafez and Other Verses. These “sonnets and other verses” are mostly quite loose translations of the fourteenth-century Persian lyric poet Khājeh Shams-od-Dīn Moḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī (c. 1325–c. 1389).
Hafez worked primarily in the ghazal, not the sonnet, still a nascent Italian form in his lifetime and not yet exported worldwide. Elizabeth Bridges maintains, in a prefatory note, that the poems in this collection are poems from Hafez, in the spirit of the dynamic equivalent. “Their aim is rather to convey if possible something of the original spirit than to give a faithful rendering of either thought or form; & I have not scrupled to omit, insert, alter or even deliberately to pervert the idea as fancy or feeling dictated.”
This aim, explicitly stated, is oddly similar to Ezra Pound’s objective in his 1915 poems “from the Chinese” in Cathay, as exemplified by “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” which appeared as Today’s Poem on May 13. At any rate, the designation of these poems by Elizabeth Bridges as “sonnets” seems meant to convey the concept of a lyric form, similar in its formal strictness and its rhetorical structure to the Petrarchan sonnet, rather than to identify the poems literally as sonnets (which they mostly are not). But she also asserts that a number of poems, including Today’s Poem, “follow the Persian fairly closely.”
In this poem we might first notice what Elizabeth Bridges Daryush’s more hostile critics would characterize as “defects.” There are the self-consciously contracted words, the thees and thines, an entire poetic voice that the twentieth century had meant to leave behind. By 1921, this diction had already fallen out of fashion, but Bridges hung onto it, possibly feeling in this instance that it “conveyed . . . something of the original spirit.” But we might also try not to get so hung up on the archaisms that we miss the actual achievement.
What she has accomplished in this poem is scrupulous attention to and preservation of its form. The ghazal consists of a maximum of fifteen free-standing couplets, independent yet formally linked by the repetition of the end rhyme (sometimes the entire end word) of the second line of each couplet. The first couplet rhymes, but the rest generally do not. The first line of the last couplet names the poem’s speaker, in this case the poet himself, cast as an exile in a “stony desert,” estranged from the familiar certainties that would grant him peace.
Have probably read to much Shakespeare, but missed noticing the whither and thine, and other older forms. There are worse things than not noticing it isn't modern, such as missing it all together.
I like old poetry and Persian poetry, so I am very glad you featured Bridges.