Poetry Corner
Upon a Claude Glass
A lady might pretend to fix her face, but scan the room inside her compact mirror – so gentlemen would scrutinize this glass to gaze on Windermere or Rydal Water
and pick their way along the clifftop tracks intent upon the romance in the box,
keeping untamed nature at their backs, and some would come to grief upon the rocks.
Don't look so smug. Don't think you're any safer as you blunder forward through your years
straining to recall some aching pleasure, or blinded by some private scrim of tears.
I know. My world's encircled by this prop, though all my life I've tried to force it shut.
Michael Donaghy (1954–2004)
This week, the poetry class is thinking about poems acting as tour guides. Thomas Neale, the Professor of Hebrew at Oxford during the reign of Elizabeth I, prepared for her visit in 1566 an imagined discourse – in Latin verse – between her and her favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (who was also Chancellor of the University). His Elizabeth declares that “the entire city [of Oxford] is [her] home” as she is led through its principal colleges and grounds. In leading Elizabeth around Oxford, Neale unwittingly also offers us – the readers of 2015 – a ride into the past, hitching a lift with those local to the (geographic and temporal) area.
Michael Donaghy, in the poem above, invites the reader on a trip to the late eighteenth century, where the Romantics are peopling the Lake District in their search for sublime scenery. Tourism in the United Kingdom had exploded; young men, unable during the Napoleonic Wars to undertake the Grand Tour so enlightening to their fathers, journeyed instead to the relative magnificence of the English North. Here they used “Claude glasses” to frame the view behind them, the better to comprehend it. But for Donaghy the Claude glass is a tormenting piece of apparatus: his introspection means he must always carry the burden of the past with him. | 
