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.
