Julia Budenz was certainly a fine poet and a fascinating character, though I never had the sense that I really understood the intellectual or emotional motives that drove her sprawling work. In her professional life, in classics, her religious studies, translating Newton, she did seem always to perch at a point where the boundaries of human understanding are most emphatically defined, and she seemed to think it her duty to report to the rest of us what the weather was like out in that borderland. I am still fond of a sonnet published in the Tennessee Review in 1997:
Reply 14 to poem 107)
by Julia Budenz
Was I undone as Dido was undone
Or did I like Aeneas hear the call
To sail away? Could Carthage hold in thrall
One whom the gods have summoned? Does the sun
Sink to a burning like the love of one
Whose love was death, or will the shining ball
Rise over Rome like love that conquers all?
Was it a person, place, or thing that won
My undefended heart? I never guessed,
When I began, that Ama, Vide, Veni,
Meant Come, Come, Come, meant For you is the nod,
The thunder, of the greatest and the best.
Is it, is he, the sky, the sky’s great god,
Jupiter, golden, bright, or gray and rainy?
(Copyright © 1996 by Julia Budenz)
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