On Hearing William Empson Read His Villanelle
Here is a poison the blood cannot dispel;
take it or leave it, it is still the same,
like stones falling down an endless well.
As William Empson read his villanelle,
I saw his wrinkled face and tired frame
lit by a poison the blood could not dispel.
He danced in his chair and his eyelids fell,
as old rhythms wracked him and old lines came
like stones falling down an endless well.
Ambiguities of pain and pleasure swell
from old poems, as if they were to blame
for a poison the blood cannot dispel.
Or is it the poems you have lost that dwell
in the blood, weightless, murmuring, beyond reclaim,
like stones fallen down an endless well?
They turn and chase the meanings they repel
the way that waking overruns a dream.
Show me a poison the blood cannot dispel.
A well that's full of stone is not a well.
DL
William Empson's villanelle, “Missing Dates,” begins with the line, “Slowly the poison the whole bloodstream fills” and includes the following lines: “It is the poems you have lost, the ills/ From missing dates, at which the heart expires.” I heard him say this poem to a small gathering of students in a common room at New College, Oxford University, in 1976, when his poem was 40 years old and he was 70.