DECLENSIONS

And every fair from fair sometimes declines

I can recall how yearly
The ranks of the GAR
Detectably thinned out
To an odd handful, merely;
A bugler, perhaps a scout
From that distant, mythic war.

In time their canes and crutches
Were discarded for wheelchairs
Pushed by some friendly boy;
Gone were the stalwart marches,
Their military airs
Lost on the plains of Troy.

And my own comrades in arms--
Those of them that survive--
Must be few and far between;
The best of them--strong and lean
And bemedalled--if still alive
Will have suffered life's random harms.

The ranks of poets, too,
Ronsard and Leopardi,
Foregather beside the Styx,
There to receive their due:
At eighty-eight went Hardy,
Keats not yet twenty-six.

Worst, those whose minds decay
Into a lingering stupor
Beyond the reach of art
And the common light of day:
Like Hölderin, Kit Smart,
And "buried-above-ground" Cowper.

May God preserve my wits,
Science do what it may
With scissors and thread and paste
To maintain the remaining bits
And faculties of today
That have not yet gone to waste.

Eyesight and hearing fade:
Yet I do not greatly care
If the grim, scythe-wielding thief
Pursue his larcenous trade,
Though anguished by the grief
Two that I love must bear.

Thanks Sam.

Leopardi/Hardy. Wonderful right to the end.
I didn't know him but--I feel I lost a friend.

That was accidental not deliberate.
Janet

What's GAR?

And where did this poem come from? Are there more? Did he leave behind much unpublished work?

I hope so, since this one is fabulous.

GAR is Grand Army of the Republic (the Yankee army, that is). This apparently appeared recently in the New York Review of Books. It sounds like it was written during his last illness.

The GAR is the "Grand Army of the Republic," which is to say the veterans of the Union side during the Civil War. It was a title never really used during the war, but came into vogue afterwards--first used, I seem to remember, to describe the troops from all the different Union forces marching together at the great victory parade in Washington after the war ended.

Hecht was born in the 1920s, and he is stretching things a bit to say he remembers from his childhood a significant number of Civil War veterans to be "thinned out." This was rather his parents' experience. By the time he would have been aware, the GAR was already down to the "odd handful." It would, in fact, surprise me if Hecht ever actually met a Civil War vet.

Not that this injures the poem.

Online source says there were 16 still alive in 1949, and I can remember the last GAR veteran dying when I was a kid. The last Confederate vet died around 1960. I believe there was a widow of a Confederate veteran who died just a year or so ago--she'd married a 70+ year old as a teenager. So it's possible that there were enough GAR vets left for musters in the early 30s.

Dave Mason says this poem was written last year in Italy.

Amazing work; incredibly fresh too, considering the subject. When Hecht mentions a poet, one sees and hears more than a mere few words. You know the authority and the weight behind the name; you can feel it being filtered through this poet.

As Sam's senior (only in years of course), I too remember the newspapers speaking of Civil War veterans when I was young. I also saw documentary footage of them, probably on a newsreel. They reminded me of the elderly George Bernard Shaw: spindly and alert. Also noticed the Confederate widow who died recently.

Terese

Just a remarkable trimeter, right up there with the title poem of his latest volume, The Darkness and the Light. So good to see a man at the top of game in his ninth decade.

Fine poem. Thanks for sharing this.

I didn't know the term GAR--but it doesn't sound far fetched to me. My grandfather, who would have only been about 10 years older than Hecht, spent boyhood afternoons at the Confederate Veterans Home listening to stories about the war. It always amazed me that I was in a sense only at one degree of remove from this point in history. I reckon a lot of the men who fought were mere boys of 15 or 16. So it is certainly possible.