Poem: Dante Lucked Out

T. S. Eliot held that Dante was lucky

to live in the Middle Ages

because life then was more logically organized

and society more coherent. The rest of us however

can’t be as sure that if we’d had the fortune

to walk along the Arno and look at the pretty girls

walking with their mothers in the fourteenth century,

then we, too, would have composed “La Vita Nuova”

and the “Divine Comedy.” It is on the contrary

far more likely that we, transported

to medieval Florence, would have died miserably

in a skirmish between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines

without the benefit of anesthesia

or would have been beaten, taunted,

cheated, and cursed as usurers

two centuries before the charging of interest

became an accepted part of Calvinist creed

and other reasons needed to be produced

to justify the persecution of the Jews.

David Lehman’s “New and Selected Poems” was published by Scribner in November 2013. He is the editor of “The Oxford Book of American Poetry” and author of “A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs,” which won ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award in 2010.